Scientists may have finally solved the mystery of why our moon is slightly tilted on its side, including why our natural satellite is somewhat far away from Earth, at 380,000 kilometers.

A team from the SETI Institute in California and University of Maryland created new models and computer simulations which revealed that a major collision formed the moon and also caused Earth to tilt on its axis.

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Researchers explained that interactions between Earth and the moon including our sun apparently caused this whirling spin, leaving Earth and the moon in its current orbit and rotation today.

The most common theory for this is known as the Giant Impact Model which posits that the infant Earth collided with a sister protoplanet known as Theia some 4.5 billion years ago.

After this colossal impact that formed our planet, some remnants of dust and rubble formed another protoplanetary disc around Earth and later formed together as the moon.

 According to the co-author of the study, Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, while this theory is famous, it does not make sense today since the Earth's spin axis is tilted to a 23.5-degree angle.

According to the laws of physics, this debris that formed the moon is thought to have originated from a ring around the equatorial region of Earth. Tidal forces should have drifted the moon away placing it in an ecliptic plane which is the same plane as Earth's orbit around the sun.

However, this is not the case, as the lunar orbit is about five degrees tilted away from the ecliptic plane today.

In this new study, researchers ran simulations and concluded that a major collision caused the Earth to spin extremely fast, twice as fast as predicted by past models. This impact also knocked the Earth off its axis between 60 to 80 degrees on its side.

Scientists explained that the newly formed moon started to orbit very close to our planet, near the equatorial region of Earth but drifted farther away, reaching 15 times as far due to the sun's powerful gravitational forces on the lunar orbit.

The team suggests that an extremely tilted Earth which was spinning so fast and a migrating moon probably caused this strange tilting of the moon.

This new study is published in the journal, Nature.