Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Astronomy: Capture of the Moon
To the casual reader, the story may sound like a far-out effort at science fiction. But the moon tale told by Swedish Physicist Hannes Alfven amounts to much more than an imaginative voyage into the distant past; it is an ingenious effort to reconstruct a cosmic catastrophe that changed the composition of man's earth and set a new course for the moon more than 2 billion years ago.
Dr. Alfven's theory reaches back to a time when the moon was not yet a satellite of earth, when it soared around the sun like any...
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