Loved the video... thank you so much to the whole SciShow team! We love you! (...and Savannah has to be one of my fave presenters, sorry everyone else, I love you too but)
Seems like, if we're only going off of samples from the very surface of both the Moon and the Earth, that the same composition could have settled on both after the impact no matter what size the two bodies were. Our understanding of the core of both is still entirely theoretical after all.
Honestly our moon is one of my favorite cosmic coincidences. It just happens to be the perfect size and distance to give us good amounts of light and tidal forces, while also being close enough to the same angular diameter as the sun, giving us our iconic and beautiful total and annular solar eclipses.
Yet another massive W for Earth, the best planet in the universe
Proto Earth was impacted by something large enough to knock our planet's axial rotation 23 degrees off its orbital plane. Those other ideas don't explain this at all.
I saw the thumbnail and just immediately heard in my head the entire conference room of Project Hail Mary researchers saying "WE DON'T KNOW!" in unison.
What makes this kind of work hard isn't the simulation. It's that the constraints you're trying to match are mostly geochemical fingerprints in samples you have a finite supply of.
Does the multiple-impact hypothesis account for the Large Low-Shear-Velocity Provinces on the border between Earth's core and mantle? The Theia theory suggests those are the leftover bits of Theia.
I thought the simulation you showed at 2:07 demonstrated a scenario in which the moon mostly formed from proto-earth material, with most to the Theia material falling back to recombine with earth.
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Yet another massive W for Earth, the best planet in the universe
"Well, when to proto-planets love eachother very much, they smash..."