{"id":3925805,"date":"2026-05-05T18:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T23:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/the-moons-formation-still-remains-a-mystery-in-many-ways\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T18:00:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T23:00:21","slug":"the-moons-formation-still-remains-a-mystery-in-many-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/the-moons-formation-still-remains-a-mystery-in-many-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"The moon&#8217;s formation still remains a mystery in many ways"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>A half century after NASA&#8217;s Apollo 17 lunar module lifted off the moon&#8217;s northeastern near side quadrant, planetary scientists still don&#8217;t completely understand when or how our moon first formed. They do agree that it involved a major impactor\u2014an object dubbed Theia by lunar scientists\u2014that likely struck Earth some 4.51 billion years ago. But the estimated size of Theia now ranges from a proto-Mercury-sized object all the way up to an object that was about half the size of present-day Earth.<\/div>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2026-05-moon-formation-mystery-ways.html\" target=\"_blank\">Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A half century after NASA&#8217;s Apollo 17 lunar module lifted off the moon&#8217;s northeastern near side quadrant, planetary scientists still don&#8217;t completely understand when or how our moon first formed. They do agree that it involved a major impactor\u2014an object dubbed Theia by lunar scientists\u2014that likely struck Earth some 4.51 billion years ago. But the [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3925805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3925805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3925805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3925805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3925805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}