When you look at the moon and see craters and dark patches, you might not give much thought to how they got there. This video from NASA shows the moon’s hot, violent history, including massive magma flows and collisions with asteroids.
Wired Science explains that after the moon was formed when a Mars-sized object hit Earth 4.5 billion years ago, causing a huge plume of ejecta to erupt into space, eventually forming a magma-covered sphere before cooling into a smooth-surfaced object in orbit around the Earth.
Wired Science adds:
The moon’s untarnished face didn’t last very long. Our early solar system was filled with enormous rocky chunks that wandered menacingly between the newly formed planets. Around 4.3 billion years ago, one of these lumps hit the lunar South Pole, creating the Aitken basin, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system.
What followed was billions of years of bombardment with space junk, volcanic eruption and other asteroid impact. The dark spots you see on the moon are thought to be left over from magma flows during a period of volcanism on the moon around 3.8 billion years ago.
Here’s what you see now.
Read more via Wired Science.