A ‘New Hope’ for Moon formation: presenting a multiple-impact pathway

ABSTRACT The leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, that of a single giant impact, faces significant challenges. These include either the need for an impactor with a near-identical composition to Earth or an extremely high mass or high energy impact to achieve near-complete material mixing. In this paper, we explore an alternative, the ‘multiple impact hypothesis’, which relaxes the compositional constraints on both the target and projectile, and allows for the consideration of more probable, less extreme impacts that steadily grow the Earth and Moon to their current size over several impact events. Using the hydrodynamical code swift, we simulate ‘chains’ of impacts and follow the growth of a moon around a planet analogous to our own. Our results demonstrate that chains of three or more impacts can produce systems comparable to the Earth–Moon system while achieving higher compositional similarities than the canonical giant impact scenario. This presents the multiple impact hypothesis as a promising alternative to the single large impact scenario for the origin of the Moon.