Uranus, Neptune, and the Mountains of the Moon

Details Uranus, Neptune, and the Mountains of the Moon Uranus, Neptune, and the Mountains of the Moon

Aug 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001psrd.repte..52t&link_type=abstract

Planetary Science Research Discoveries

Computer Science

Moon, Lunar Cataclysm, Bombardment, Basins, Craters

Scientific paper

Huge circular basins, marked by low regions surrounded by concentric mountain ranges, decorate the Moon. The giant holes may have formed during a short, violent period from about 3.9 to 3.8 billion years ago. Three hundred to 1000 kilometers in diameter, their sizes suggest that fast-moving objects with diameters of 20 to about 150 kilometers hit the Moon. Numerous smaller craters also formed. If most large lunar craters formed between 3.9 and 3.8 billion years ago, where were the impactors sequestered for over 600 million years after the Moon formed?
One possibility has been studied with computer simulations by Harold Levison and colleagues from the Southwest Research Institute (Boulder, Colorado), Queen's University (Ontario, Canada), and NASA Ames Research Center in California. The idea, originally suggested in 1975 by George Wetherill (Carnegie Institution of Washington), is that a large population of icy objects inhabited the Solar System beyond Saturn. They were in stable orbits around the Sun for several hundred million years until, for some reason, Neptune and Uranus began to form. As the planets grew by capturing the smaller planetesimals, their growing gravitational attraction began to scatter the remaining planetesimals, catapulting millions of them into the inner Solar System. A small fraction of these objects crashed into the Moon and rocky planets, sculpturing the surfaces with immense craters. Calculations suggest that the bombardment would have lasted less than 100 million years, consistent with the ages of craters and impact basins in the lunar highlands.

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