Word: asphaug
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...these ancient events, Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz re-enacted them in their computers by taking into account such factors as gravity, impact shock, melting and vaporization. They also created models with a finer level of detail than earlier efforts. Finally, after a number of tries, they arrived at a scenario in which an object, the size of Mars but with only one-tenth the Earth's mass, striking at a highly oblique angle, ejected enough debris from itself and our planet's iron...
Apart from satisfying our curiosity about how the moon formed, the new work has broader implications. Explains Asphaug: "It's now known that giant collisions are a common aspect of planet formation, and these big impacts might go a long way toward explaining the puzzling diversity observed among planets." That diversity was emphasized last week when astronomers using the University of California's Lick telescope reported the discovery of two planets in orbit around a distant star. Unlike all previously discovered extra-solar planets, which have highly elliptical orbits, these two were moving in nearly circular paths. Alas, even...
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