| Summary: | © The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Nielsen, S. G., Bekaert, D. V., & Auro, M. Isotopic evidence for the formation of the moon in a canonical giant impact. Nature Communications, 12(1), (2021): 1817, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22155-7. Isotopic measurements of lunar and terrestrial rocks have revealed that, unlike any other body in the solar system, the Moon is indistinguishable from the Earth for nearly every isotopic system. This observation, however, contradicts predictions by the standard model for the origin of the Moon, the canonical giant impact. Here we show that the vanadium isotopic composition of the Moon is offset from that of the bulk silicate Earth by 0.18 ± 0.04 parts per thousand towards the chondritic value. This offset most likely results from isotope fractionation on proto-Earth during the main stage of terrestrial core formation (pre-giant impact), followed by a canonical giant impact where ~80% of the Moon originates from the impactor of chondritic composition. Our data refute the possibility of post-giant impact equilibration between the Earth and Moon, and implies that the impactor and proto-Earth mainly accreted from a common isotopic reservoir in the inner solar system. This study was funded by NASA Emerging Worlds grant NNX16AD36G to S.G.N. We thank NASA-JSC, Tony Irving, and Thorsten Kleine for access to meteorite and Apollo mission samples. US Antarctic meteorite samples are recovered by the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, which has been funded by NSF and NASA, and characterized and curated by the Astromaterials Curation Office at NASA Johnson Space Center and the Department of Mineral Sciences of the Smithsonian Institution. J. Blusztajn is thanked for help with mass spectrometry support at WHOI.
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