(June 5, 2014 at 4:52 pm)Welsh cake Wrote: You'd think there be nothing but debris, another asteroid belt around the Sun.
In a way, there was nothing but debris moments after the impact. The structure of the original earth and the impactor was almost totally disrupted by the big splat.
It was only fact that the impactor revolved around the sun in the same direction as the earth, and approached earth relatively gentally, that kept the impact energy relatively low, and kept most of the debris from simply flying off to form a asteriod belt around the sun, but instead quickly fell back on the center of the mass to reform the earth, with a small portion remaining in an orbit to for a new moon.
If the impact had been head on, the collision would have been vastly more energetic and there would be no more earth left.
