People have long envisioned faces, rabbits, or a man carrying a bundle when they stare at the midnight orb. The moon's mysterious dark blotches are actually scars left by enormous space debris that pounded the surface of the moon billions of years ago.

Scientists previously knew a massive space rock—actually a crater known as the 'Mare Imbrium,' Latin for 'sea of showers,'—created the right eye of the legendary 'man in the moon,' without having any idea about how huge it was.

According to a recent scientific study that was released on Wednesday, the moon was struck by an asteroid around 3.8 billion years ago that was about the size of New Jersey. With a diameter of 150 miles, the asteroid is nearly ten times larger than originally thought.

Pete Schultz, a professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University and the study's lead author, said, 'We show that Imbrium was probably generated by an extraordinarily huge object, large enough to be designated as a 'protoplanet'. The findings was published in Nature, a British journal.

In order to simulate what occurred on the moon billions of years ago, Schultz employed a massive 14-foot cannon from NASA that shoots tiny pellets at up to 16,000 mph.He discovered that the crater's channels were probably created by pieces of the asteroid that sheared off during initial contact with the lunar surface. Schultz was able to determine the asteroid's size according to the tracks the fragments left behind.

Because the asteroid was so large, portions of it escaped and exploded against other solar system worlds, including the moon.

More than half of the asteroid was destroyed when it collided with the moon, according to Schultz. However, a part would have managed to escape lunar gravity and be propelled into an orbit around the sun, creating a brand-new collection of Earth-moon-crossing objects.

The study's findings also suggest that the asteroids storm that bombarded Mercury, Mars, and Earth four billion years ago was more catastrophic than previously thought.

According to Schultz, none of the enormous objects are left, and the last significant impact on the moon occurred about 3.78 billion years ago, therefore Earthlings no longer need to be concerned about collisions of this magnitude.

'The moon still has clues that can affect how we view the entire solar system,' he said. Its shattered face can provide valuable information about the neighborhood's 3.8 billion-year-old history.