Washington: The Ocean of Storms on the near side of the moon, a giant basin often referred to as the “man in the moon”, likely arose not from a massive asteroid strike but from a large plume of magma deep within the moon’s interior, a US study said Wednesday.

Some previous theories suggested that the 3,000-km-diameter basin, also known as the Oceanus Procellarum, was formed by a massive impact, in which case it would have been the largest impact basin on the moon. Subsequent asteroid collisions overprinted the region with smaller — although still large — basins, according to Xinhua.

These theories believed that such impacts may have created what we see today as dark spots on the near side of the moon and inspired the popular notion of a “man in the moon”.