Реферат: Theories Of The Origin Of The Moon

judgement on

it until a lot of testing has been conducted. The next step clearly called

for

numerical simulations on supercomputers.

?The author in collaboration with Willy Benz (Harvard), Wayne L.Slattery at

(Los

Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos NM), and H. Jay Melosh (University

of

Arizona, Tucson, AZ) undertook such simulations. They have used an

unconventional technique called smooth particle hydrodynamics to simulate

the

planetary collision in three dimensions. With this technique, we have

followed a

simulated collision (with some set of initial conditions) for many hours of

real

time, determining the amount of mass that would escape from the Earth-Moon

system, the amount of mass that would be left in orbit, as well as the

relative

amounts of rock and iron that would be in each of these different mass

fractions.

We have carried out simulations for a variety of different initial

conditions and

have shown that a "successful" simulation was possible if the impacting

body had

a mass not very different from 1.2 Mars masses, that the collision occurred

with

approximately the present angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, and

that the impacting body was initially in an orbit not very different from

that of the