Growth of the Moon due to bodies ejected from the Earth

TL;DR

This study models the ejection and orbital evolution of bodies from Earth, assessing their collision probabilities with Earth and Moon, and implications for lunar formation and material transfer during early Earth history.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the collision probabilities of ejected Earth material with the Moon at various ejection velocities, informing lunar formation theories.

Findings

Higher ejection velocities decrease collision probabilities with Earth and Moon.

Most ejected bodies leave Earth's Hill sphere and have long dynamical lifetimes.

Ejected material alone cannot account for the Moon's current mass.

Abstract

The evolution of the orbits of bodies ejected from the Earth has been studied at the stage of its accumulation and early evolution after impacts of large planetesimals. In the considered variants of calculations of the motion of bodies ejected from the Earth, most of the bodies left the Hill sphere of the Earth and moved in heliocentric orbits. Their dynamical lifetime reached several hundred million years. At higher ejection velocities vej the probabilities of collisions of bodies with the Earth and Moon were generally lower. Over the entire considered time interval at the ejection velocity vej, equal to 11.5, 12 and 14 km/s, the values of the probability of a collision of a body with the Earth were approximately 0.3, 0.2 and 0.15-0.2, respectively. At ejection velocities vej<11.25 km/s, i.e., slightly exceeding a parabolic velocity, most of the ejected bodies fell back to the Earth. The probability of a collision of a body ejected from the Earth with the Moon moving in its present orbit was approximately 15-35 times less than that with the Earth at vej>11.5 km/s. The probability of a collision of such bodies with the Moon was mainly about 0.004-0.008 at ejection velocities of at least 14 km/s and about 0.006-0.01 at vej=12 km/s. It was larger at lower ejection velocities and was in the range of 0.01-0.02 at vej=11.3 km/s. The Moon may contain material ejected from the Earth during the accumulation of the Earth and during the late heavy bombardment. At the same time, as obtained in our calculations, the bodies ejected from the Earth and falling on the Moon embryo would not be enough for the Moon to grow to its present mass from a small embryo moving along the present orbit of the Moon. This result argues in favor of the formation of a lunar embryo and its further growth to most of the present mass of the Moon near the Earth.