by Nitpicker » Wed Nov 26, 2014 6:41 am
BDanielMayfield wrote:Since we're declaring personal beliefs ... (made moderators nervous, I bet) ... I believe that the evidence for a major protoplanetary collision as a cause for our Moon's existence is compelling; therefore I'm compelled to believe that this collision did occur.
Real question: since the energy released during this collision would have been enormous, and since the proto-Earth prior to the instant of the collision would have already been quite hot from prior impacts and the much higher radioactivity back then, wouldn't the Moon forming collision have melted the entire crust of proto-Earth?
Bruce
Personal beliefs are fine here, so long as they don't deviate too far from the mainstream scientific consensus, and are allowed to yield to new evidence.
To answer your real question, one would have to know what the proto-Earth was like before the collision, how much kinetic energy was converted into heat energy, and how that heat energy was transferred through what remained of the proto-Earth (after it
molted shed some of its mass to help form the Moon). An enormous amount of energy is not guaranteed to be enormous enough.
[quote="BDanielMayfield"]Since we're declaring personal beliefs ... (made moderators nervous, I bet) ... I believe that the evidence for a major protoplanetary collision as a cause for our Moon's existence is compelling; therefore I'm compelled to believe that this collision did occur.
Real question: since the energy released during this collision would have been enormous, and since the proto-Earth prior to the instant of the collision would have already been quite hot from prior impacts and the much higher radioactivity back then, wouldn't the Moon forming collision have melted the entire crust of proto-Earth?
Bruce[/quote]
Personal beliefs are fine here, so long as they don't deviate too far from the mainstream scientific consensus, and are allowed to yield to new evidence.
To answer your real question, one would have to know what the proto-Earth was like before the collision, how much kinetic energy was converted into heat energy, and how that heat energy was transferred through what remained of the proto-Earth (after it [s]molted[/s] shed some of its mass to help form the Moon). An enormous amount of energy is not guaranteed to be enormous enough.