A celestial body you see was born from Earth in just a few hours.

A new supercomputer simulation based on known data about Earth, the Moon and the hypothetical planet Theia has revealed a shocking piece of Earth's history.

Research just published in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that just hours after being torn apart by a violent event billions of years ago, the Earth was no longer alone.

Using the power of a supercomputer, a team led by computational cosmologist Jacob Kegerreis from Durham University in the UK showed that the Moon was formed within hours of an event that partially broke apart the Earth , which theories point to Thiea, a Mars-sized planet that collided with and merged with the primordial Earth.

The Moon formed just hours later from the rubble of Earth's torn body after a violent collision - Photo: Jacob Kegerreis

According to Live Science, the hypothesis that the Moon formed from a collision is just a hypothesis that has long been discussed by scientists, but there is little data to prove it is true, besides evidence that the materials of the Earth and the Moon have great similarities, showing that these two celestial bodies are highly likely to have once been a single body.

Using a supercomputer nicknamed COSMA, short for "cosmic machine," housed at Durham University's Distributed Advanced Research Computing (DiRAC) facility , the team simulated hundreds of ways in which the primordial Earth and Theia could collide.

Simulations of the collision from different angles, speeds and trajectories have shown how material was ejected from the collision, and how this chaotic debris coalesced over a matter of hours.

That rapid condensation, the Moon, with its primary material coming from Earth , not Theia, makes the Moon a wonderful laboratory for Earth's history.

The model also produced something that perfectly matched the known properties of the Moon: a wide, tilted orbit, a partially molten interior, a thin crust.

According to Dr Kegerreis, the discovery shows that analyzing samples from the Moon - which has changed little since its primeval days because the satellite is not as active as Earth - can help answer humanity's great question about how life on Earth originated.