The moon may share several similarities with Earth because it formed out of a collision involving the planet and another object with a similar makeup.

According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Nature believe this has also led to less-noticeable differences as well. The study is one of three published in the journal that explores the origins of the moon.

"The most exciting and surprising thing was to find out that we can shed new light on a 30-year-old mystery," study co-author Hagai Perets, an astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, told Space.com. "Compositionally similar planet-impactor pairs are not rare at all."

For their study, the researchers created a model for how the inner part of the solar system looked early in its existence. The Earth-like object, which was likely a fraction the size, also collided with other proto-planets before ramming Earth. The debris from that final collision is what then formed the moon.

"They all tell the same story - it all falls into place," Matthias Willbold a planetary scientist at the University of Manchester, told BBC News. "It's quite striking. [The lunar rock studies] mention that it is quite baffling that the Earth and Moon have the same starting composition, before the bombardment.

"And that links perfectly into the modeling paper, where they say look - we can resolve that. If you look at the models, the impactor and the Earth were similar, so we just solved your problem!"