TL;DR
The most widely accepted theory is that the Moon formed from debris after a Mars-sized body, Theia, collided with the proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago [1:1]
[2:2]
[5:1].
Giant Impact Hypothesis
The prevailing scientific explanation for the Moon's formation is the Giant Impact Hypothesis. According to this theory, a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia collided with the early Earth, causing both bodies to liquify and eject a significant amount of material into space. This material eventually coalesced under gravity to form the Moon [1:3]
[2:5]. Evidence supporting this hypothesis includes the geochemical similarities between Earth and Moon rocks, as well as deep mantle blooms in Earth's core thought to be remnants of Theia
[2:5].
Simulation Insights
Recent simulations by NASA and Durham University suggest that the Moon may have formed rapidly, within hours, following the impact. These simulations are among the most detailed ever conducted, providing new insights into how material from Earth and Theia was launched into orbit [3]. The simulations illustrate how solid masses can behave like liquids due to the immense mass and energy involved in such collisions
[4:3].
Alternative Theories and Criticisms
While the Giant Impact Hypothesis is widely accepted, it is not without criticism. Some argue that there are holes in the conventional theory and point to alternative explanations, such as the Moon being an artificial satellite or having been brought from another location [2:4]
[2:3]. Additionally, some cultural legends speak of a time before the Moon existed
[2:7], although these claims lack scientific evidence.
Tidal Locking
A common misconception is that the Moon does not rotate. In reality, the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, meaning its rotation period matches its orbital period, so it always shows the same face to Earth. This phenomenon is well understood and occurs with many other moons in our solar system [2:6]
[2:11].
In summary, while the Giant Impact Hypothesis remains the leading explanation for the Moon's formation, ongoing research and simulations continue to refine our understanding of this celestial event.
Two planets, Earth and Theia, crashed into each other. This scattered planet bits all around it. Some bits flew off into space. Some were caught in the gravity and pulled back to the planet. Some bits ended up staying put, and eventually clumped together to form the Moon.
The current leading explanation is that the moon is made up of material that was ejected from the proto Earth when it had a collision with a Mars size planet. This collision was enough to essentially liquified both bodies and eject a large amount of material into space.
That would explain why the moon has an iron core, which wouldn't make sense if it just came about as material slowly building up in orbit of the Earth.
This is still an open question in astronomy.
The current leading theory is that 4.5 billion years ago the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet named Theia, and the moon was formed from the debris of the collision. According to this theory, both the modern Earth and the moon are composed of material originating in both planets.
The moon is a large ball of rock that orbits the Earth. It actually came from the Earth itself. Roughly 4.4 billion years ago, a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth and blasted massive amounts of molten rock into Earth's orbit. over time, this debris clumped together under gravity and cooled and became the moon.
Curious to hear ideas people have on how the moon formed
A prevailing scientific theory is that the moon formed when the Earth was hit by a large asteroid, knocking off a large piece -- or that two large bodies collided in the early solar system, forming both the Earth and the moon at once. I will respond to many of the questions you bring up with this theory in mind.
I reckon NHI hollowed out the moon and brought it here from another location
There is very strong geochemical evidence that the moon was once part of the Earth, or formed form the same parent bod(ies). Samples from Apollo missions have the same isotopic (radioactive element) ratios as Earth. The chances of a body from another planet, let alone another solar system, naturally having this is infinitesimally small. And in order to manipulate it to be so, you would basically have to build the entire moon from scratch, you couldn't just take an existing satellite from elsewhere and tamper with it.
What are the chances that it perfectly eclipses the sun
The best point you bring up, because this actually is an inexplicable coincidence, that if purely deterministic required great luck. To be honest, it's one of the things that make me question the existence of a higher power.
Brief background you are probably already aware of: The apparent size of the moon depends on both its actual size and its distance from Earth. The moon's distance from Earth is not static. The moon has an elliptical orbit, such that it is sometimes closer and sometimes further away from us. That is why some eclipses are total, and some are annular (ie, the moon doesn't perfectly eclipse and instead leaves a ring of fire.) More saliently, the moon is moving further away from us over time, with its orbit increasing by around 4cm per year. 100 million years ago (time of the T. rex), annular eclipses never occurred bc the moon was so close that it always fully eclipsed the sun. Similarly, in 50 million years, total eclipses will no longer happen, only annular ones, bc the moon will be too far away to fully eclipse. This gives an ~100 million year window in which 'perfect' eclipses are possible.
rotates so that the dark side never faces us where there are possibly gigantic non manmade structures
This is known as tidal locking, and the moon and the Earth is far from the only example of it. Its occurrence is fully explained by ordinal physics. All satellites with great enough mass to be rounded experience tidal locking over time. All 19 known rounded (spherical) satellites in our solar system are tidally locked out their home planet. Don't take my word for it, here is a Wikipedia article, scroll to section about satellites, you will notice every satellite's rotational period is the same as its orbital period. It is not a coincidence that the moon is like this, it is a guarantee that any satellite of sufficient mass will eventually become tidally locked with its parent body.
life probably would not exist on earth if the moon didn’t create earths tides
Earth would certainly be incredibly different without tides. Additionally, the hypothesized asteroid collision that formed the moon is also what lead to Earth's axis tilt and therefore seasons. However, neither of these things have anything to do with NHI.
Apparently, the moon is far bigger than it should be compared to other moons in general
It's unclear exactly what you mean by this. Assuming you mean to compare the size of the moon to the satellites around gas giants, the reason the moon is so much bigger is because of entirely different formation processes.
weighs far less than earth when comparing to earth size
No, the moon has around 60% of Earth density. The surface rocks of the Earth and moon are comparable in density, but the major overall density difference is due to the moon's relative lack of heavy metals, in particular, its small iron core compared to Earth's. This can be explained by the impact hypothesis, since an impact would knock off what it reaches on the surface, leaving the core of the Earth intact.
which suggests to me it may be hollow
The moon cannot be hollow. We have seismographic data that shows this beyond any doubt. Further, the overall mass of the moon is consistent with what this seismographic data suggests the size of the moon's core is. That is, there is no missing or extra mass when looking at the overall mass of the moon and what seismographic data shows internal layers of the moon to be. (Seisomgraphs allow the relative densities of various layers that seismic waves pass through to be determined, and are commonly used to study internal structures of planetary bodies.)
I heard recently that it is actually an artificial satellite/observation unit, all the other planetary bodies and moons rotate, how come the moon does not rotate? Not sure if it is true but heard as well it was built in another place and navigated into place
The moon is not the only one that is like that and it's a very well explained phenomenon. The moon does not appear to rotate due to an effect called tidal locking.
This effect comes from the gravity of moon and earth interacting. Basically, just like the moons gravity pulls on earth causing tides, so does earth pull on the moon causing tidal forces.
These tidal forces lack behind the rotation of the moon and thus slowed it down over time. By now do much that there is no net rotation anymore.
This is pretty much basic newtonian physics. And it's not exclusive to the moon. In fact all 20 large moons in our solar system are tidally locked. Pluto and it's moon have even each other locked and don't have net rotation relativ to each other.
Why the moon does not seem to rotate is definitely a cool question, but it's one any physics class in school should have answered
This is true, but doesn't address the title.
The reality is no one knows how the moon was formed. Not a clue. In fact, it's existence defies explanation.
At least 19 other moons in our solar system (I believe all moons that are large enough to be “round”) are tidally locked to their planet, just like ours.
There is pretty conclusive evidence that a Mars sized protoplanet (who researchers have named theia) collided with proto earth and the resulting ejecta/ matter coalesced into the moon. Some proof exists in moon rock composition and in deep mantle blooms in earths core that are thought to be the remnant core chunks of theia. Also accounts for some of our axial tilt.
Too big to be captured or formed naturally due to accretion. I'm not a subscriber to far out theories when other evidence with much more plausible potential exists. This would have happened during the Hadean eon, so earth was largely a ball of molten rock when this occurred. Theia too.
A moon sized space station or ship is so ridiculous a concept it's not worthy of thought. The sheer resource development required would render the point of construction moot. You could make much smaller and more efficient space stations or observation posts if you have the level of tech required to make a moon sized base. Just a dumb idea.
There are many more holes to this theory than there is conclusive evidence to support it.
Here's just one article explaining how much this conventional idea has been called into question.
Incredulity is only evidence of a lack of imagination, it does not disprove any theory.
This is only a theory based on one piece of evidence the surface rocks of the moon being made of similar soil to earth while completely ignoring oral tradition and the physics behind the lander crash experiment while also assuming gravity anomalies inside our planet to be an entirely different planet just to assert this being the way the moon was formed. This theory also ignores the lack of core drilling done on the moon due to titanium drill bits breaking at the same depth everywhere the astronauts drilled
there are legends from Sth America, Sth Africa and Greece that talk about a time before there was a moon in the sky...........
Look it up, 1969 Apollo lunar lander module was jettisoned as they departed the moon's surface and the seismographs on the moon's surface detected the moon ringing "like a bell" when the module impacted. Scientists derived that the moon must be hollow, or at the very least has massive hollowed out sections. Also no other planet/moon pair has been found anywhere in the universe with a similiar size ratio or orbital path. In other words other moons orbiting other planets are drastically smaller in size (asteroid size) and not locked in orbits where only 1 side is visiible. All that and the other stuff is a very curious circumstance.
It’s down voted because it is not alternative history, but the most conventionally accepted current theory. Bad mouthing the idea that the moon is artificially constructed or adapted to some specific purpose beyond our understanding is ignorant and asinine. Also who has the right to tell others what is not worthy of their thought!?
The fact that the moon just happens to perfectly eclipse the sun has always seemed strange to me. Just like the fact that we seem to be bang in the middle between the smallest and largest known thing in the universe. What are the odds hey?
Credit: NASA/Durham University/Jacob Kegerreis
A new NASA and Durham University simulation puts forth a different theory of the Moon’s origin - the Moon may have formed in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and a Mars sized-body were launched directly into orbit after the impact. The simulations used in this research are some of the most detailed of their kind, operating at the highest resolution of any simulation run to study the Moon’s origins or other giant impacts.
By the way this is just a theory, one of many. The moon is weird as fuck. It’s an entire rabbit hole you don’t want to go down. But ill say this the oldest rock ever found was on the moon not on earth.
That partially makes sense with how many asteroids and whatnot hit the moon. Probably peppered in rocks older than we'd think. Plus the moon doesn't recycle it's surface like the earth does. It doesn't have plate tectonics, so all the rocks on its surface are going to primarily be from when it cooled down after forming, that then were broken up and tossed around as smaller collisions occured due to asteroids.
Okay let’s get weirder, did you ever hear about the Apollo 11 seismic tests?
Would the other planet actually warp like that right before the collision?
The moon still warps earth.
Yes. Theia would have crossed the Roche Limit and lost its shape in the presence of Earth's greater gravitational influence.
Yes the intense gravity of the other larger body would start to destroy the surface before it collided. Remember our world is just a bunch of rocks resting on top of each other in this gravity well. Only gravity is holding the surface and the atmosphere to it.
So here’s another thought, there’s probably billions of “rogue” planets flying around our galaxy right now. Planets of all sizes, not illuminated by a star, with no way to see or detect them, that can come from anywhere at anytime and absolutely wreck our solar system without even a direct hit. Just one day one could enter our system with enough mass to send other bodies from the Oort Cloud hurtling towards the solar system. If a big enough one enters our outer or inner solar system it could destabilize it and eject planets out of orbit from the sun. There’d be nothing we could do, it would one day be the last day.
That's true, but keep in mind that the Earth was hit in a time where the solar system was still forming. There was still A LOT of shit randomly flying around in a relatively small space at the time.
I've got to rewatch that show.
It's not a fresh take, it's the most advanced simulation OF that theory
It's a cartoon.
Yeah this must be how it went… Because supercomputers, lots of imagination and stuff
I don’t under how solid masses would move like liquids like that. I mean I guess it makes more sense than debris accumulation being packed together by gravitational pull. Idk hours seems a bit rushed but I’m not a scientist.
I think the reason is because there is so much mass and energy that it doesn’t really matter whether it’s solid or liquid
Yeah and maybe its makes more sense to our modeling to treat em like liquid
What about Jesus or hey what if his name was bob. Now I got u thinkin
Poppycock
Yes. But sadly the moon is the last of its species and is very lonely. Maybe you can visit it some time and tell it that everything will be okay and god has a plan for it.
lies allah made it
And Mohammed supposedly 'split' it too. Yet magically and mysteriously there seems to be no split at all and no other culture on the planet noticed the split occur. Almost like it was a fictional tale all along.
I am allah and I know that I didn't make it.
What does this have to do with atheism?
It was (more then likely) caused/created by a planetary collision.
so, when planets colide they make moons, if moons came from planet collisions, howcomw we never see one been made huh?
Do you have any idea how large the observable galaxy is? And how scant few years we've been observing it? Do you really think we can or have seen even 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of it yet? Please stop being silly.
Because the space between objects is huge and this makes collisions between large objects rare, especially after most of the debris in a star’s accretion disk has coalesced into planets and said planets have found their stable orbits.
u/Street_Chicken,
This is a subreddit for debating atheists, not for dropping low-effort subject-line questions. You've got an hour - if you can edit your original post to make an actual argument related to atheism, fantastic. If you don't do that, I'll lock the thread.
Reddit account is 9 days old at -1 karma. User made 3 other posts, all trolling and removed by mods.
> The Moon is thought to have formed about 4.51 billion years ago, not long after Earth. The most widely accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia. New research of moon rocks, although not rejecting the Theia hypothesis, suggests that the moon may be older than previously thought.[13]
Working under the most common theory of the Moon’s formation; a large object striking the Earth and the subsequent debris forming our only natural satellite, why did this happen rather than the Earth’s strong gravity pulling the debris back toward itself?
Both happened, the vast majority of the material was reformed into the Earth, and only a small amount which had enough energy to achieve a high orbit was able to be swept up into the Moon.
If there was that much debris, why doesn't Earth have any rings?
To add to what whyisthesky said, I think a factor about rings was a lot got flung out to the asteroid belt?
Rings are short lived, cosmologically speaking. Saturn's rings are predicted to have a remaining lifetime of around 300M years.
The moon formed billions of years ago and between both the time that has elapsed the extreme tidal forces generated by the Earth-Luna system (relative to other planets and moons, our moon is huge compared to its parent planet), any debris would have been knocked out of orbit back to Earth or onto the moon itself.
The gravitational relationship between earth and moon means that there is an energy exchange between the bodies that is giving the moon additional energy over time.
In short the earth gets some rotational velocity stolen which is added to the moons ordinal velocity.
Eventually the moon will escape…
What I don’t know is how long the earths days will be at that time :-)
That's happening on an extremely slow timescale though. What I'm talking about would happen in a single orbit. For the moon, that would be about 27 days.
If you fire a cannonball from a cannon at orbital velocity, the location of the cannon is still part of that orbit. Faster initial speeds make the apogee higher, but the perigee is pinned, unless there is some kind of Delta-v maneouvre. Neglecting things like air resistance and rotation of the earth, you would expect the cannonball to go once around the earth and hit the back of the cannon.
TL;DR: Combination of the angle of the strike, and consistency of the target. Picture it like firing a high-powered slingshot's marble at an apple, striking the exact center versus striking off to the side - the second type of hit knocks away chunks that only fly off so far.
A slingshot marble hitting an apple straight in the middle, much like a large object hitting the earth straight-on, would caused a spray in all directions, like a ball bearing dropped into flour. Depending on mass and velocity it could have either shattered the apple/earth and kept going, or got stuck into the apple/earth while causing a huge "splash" of apple/molten rock. But the resulting spray wouldn't come out in a huge glob. It'd be almost an aerosol.
However, if our marble/asteroid hit at a glancing angle and gouged instead of slamming directly in, it could have pushed out or broken away very large chunks of apple/molten rock in a way that didn't force everything scattered from the impact to fly apart in small masses. And in the Earth case, there could have been a huge mass of material, some still in giant chunks, shoved away at an angle to the Earth and going fast enough to form an orbital path so they couldn't fall back to ground.
Now the very large pieces would not have enough escape velocity to leave Earth's orbit completely, and they would have acted like a vaccuum cleaner over time, sweeping the area of other debris and absorbing it thanks to their gravity and size. That mass would also have been super hot from the energy of the impact and the fact that the Earth itself was hot too (and it still is, if you gouge deep enough).
And the gravity would have caused that liquid, plasticky rock to collapse into the most efficient shape for a ball of near-liquid material - a sphere. And that's why the moon is a ball rather than a torn-up irregular lump.
Isnt the moon slowly escaping the Earth's gravity? I thought I read that it is getting like a millimeter or some shit further away each year and that eventually it will fly off away from us.
That's due to the effects of the moon's gravity on the Earth not from it having the initial speed to retreat from the Earth after all these billions of years. Essentially the moon is "stealing" the rotational energy of the Earth through the drag it creates from tidal effects.
It achieved escape velocity during the initial splash and happened to fall into a sustainable orbit.
Then it didn't reach escape velocity. Escape velocity is the speed required to escape an orbit around the Earth, or other body.
The moon is getting a bit farther away from the earth every years and we will eventually loose the moon
So technically it did reach escape velocity but it isn't done escaping yet
This isn't anywhere near "new".
I think the "new" part they're referring to is the fact that the simulation thinks it only took a few hours. I was always under the impression that the two stabilized with each other over the course of millenia.
It seems unlikely anything that massive and fast moving would leave a stable anything in orbit with timescales occurring in hours, but if the supercomputer says it sounds ok.
Yeah, this has been the prevailing theory for decades now.
My first thought, too. Not new. Maybe there is some unstated aspect of this that is new, but I don't see it in the video.
It was new when the video came out.
/s
What's the time scale ?
Rough estimate:
The initial impact sent a wave across the planet. The wave took about a second to travel 12000 km (eyeballed). It's a p-wave so it goes straight through, rather than going around the surface.
A cursory google search says magma p-waves travels at about 5km/s.
So that second in real time represents about 2400 seconds.
Simulation lasts ~30s long.
The entire process shown took around 20 hours.
I remember reading somewhere that the whole simulation lasts around 13 hours, but I can't seem to find that information in NASA's article about the simulation.
"Most theories claim the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. A new simulation puts forth a different theory – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact."
The forbidden lava lamp
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lowell_astro_geek/profilecard/?igsh=M3FjZXEycTUyZGg5
Our one and only natural satellite was formed 4.5 billion years ago after a great collision. The collision was with a Mars-sized object called Theia, flinging debris into space that collected into the Moon. Our moon is the only moon in the solar system that is just called "moon".
Moon Phase: Waxing Gibbous Illumination: 70.34% Moon Age: 8.66 days Scope: Explore Scientific ES127-FCD100 with EAF Camera: ZWO 2600MC-Pro Filter: None Mount: ZWO AM5 Exposures: 4 panel mosaic, 3000 frames each with best 25% used. Processed in Pixinsight and Lightroom
Hello, /u/jcat47! Thank you for posting! Just a quick reminder, all images posted to /r/astrophotography must include all acquisition and processing details you may have. This can be in your post body, in a top-level comment in your post, or included in your astrobin metadata if you're posting with astrobin.
If your post is found to be missing this information after a short grace period it will be removed.
Thank you!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lowell_astro_geek/profilecard/?igsh=M3FjZXEycTUyZGg5
Our one and only natural satellite was formed 4.5 billion years ago after a great collision. The collision was with a Mars-sized object called Theia, flinging debris into space that collected into the Moon. Our moon is the only moon in the solar system that is just called "moon".
Moon Phase: Waxing Gibbous Illumination: 70.34% Moon Age: 8.66 days Scope: Explore Scientific ES127-FCD100 with EAF Camera: ZWO 2600MC-Pro Filter: None Mount: ZWO AM5 Exposures: 4 panel mosaic, 3000 frames each with best 25% used. Processed in Pixinsight and Lightroom
I was watching Cosmos 2, and around 31 minutes into episode 1, she said,
"Our sun's birthday is August 31st on the cosmic calendar, 4.5 billion years ago. Like the other worlds of our solar system, Earth was formed from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the newborn sun. Repeated collisions produced a growing ball of debris. (As an asteroid flies and collides with another asteroid, changing its trajectory) We exist because the gravity of that one next to it just nudged it an inch to the left. What difference could an inch make on the scale of the solar system? Just wait. You'll see. The Earth took one hell of a beating in its first billion years. Fragments of orbiting debris collided and coalesced until they snowballed to form our moon. The moon is a souvenir of that violent epoch. If you stood on the surface of that long-ago Earth, the moon would have looked a hundred times brighter. It was ten times closer back then, locked in a much more intimate gravitational embrace. As the Earth cooled, the sea began to form. The tides were a thousand times higher then. Over the eons, tidal friction within the Earth pushed the moon away."
How can tidal friction in the Earth's seas push the moon away?
The Moons gravity acts across the Earth differentially (not the same everywhere) and gives rise to what is known as the tidal force. The tidal force acts to deform the Earth but the response of the Earth to this force is visco-elastic meaning that essentially there is a dissipation of energy (mechanical energy gets converted into heat). If there was no dissipation then the response of the Earth would be resonant with the forcing. Since there is dissipation then there is a phase lag between the forcing and the response of the Earth, exactly like a harmonic oscillator. The handwavey consequence is that the Earth deforms like in this figure (the reason this is handwavey is because in general tidal dissipation does not need to create a deformation, as long as the tidal energy is being dissipated then that is sufficient, but this is subtle and likely beyond a reddit post). From this you can see that there is what is known as a tidal bulge and it is misaligned with the line of centres (an imaginary line joining the centres of the two objects). As such, there is more mass at one side of the line than the other and hence an asymmetry in the gravity well of the Earth. That gravity well is essentially telling the Moon how to orbit the Earth and the consequence of this misalignment is that the Moon migrates outwards (it should be noted that tides do not always cause outward migration and the direction of migration is determined by the sign of the difference between the primary spin frequency and the secondary orbital frequency, a negative/positive sign meaning inwards/outwards migration).
So essentially tidal friction is what drives this migration. The source need not be from the oceans, and there are many sources of tidal dissipation, but for the Earth the dominant source of tidal dissipation is from the oceans.
From this you can see that there is what is known as a tidal bulge and it is misaligned with the line of centres (an imaginary line joining the centres of the two objects). As such, there is more mass at one side of the line than the other and hence an asymmetry in the gravity well of the Earth.
I know this is not the strictly correct/complete explanation, but isn't there in principle equally much mass on either side? It's just that the mass on one side of the line is closer to the moon, due to the misaligned bulges, and that greater proximity increases the gravitational attraction.
That is right.
Another way, that I think is a little better to be honest if you can work through the mathematics, is you can write down an expression for the temporal rate of change of the total mechanical energy (primary spin plus secondary orbital under the assumption the secondary is a point mass) and make a substitution using Kepler's 3rd law and the conservation of angular momentum. If you then assume energy is being dissipated the time rate of change of the total energy must be negative and from here it just drops out that the secondary must migrate. So all you need is the dissipation of energy by some mechanism and you do not strictly need the tidal deformation. There are a number of mechanisms that dissipate tidal energy that do not require a tidal deformation such as the dissipation of tidally excited internal gravity waves within some stars.
appreciated it for your reply !
The part of the Earth that is under the Moon gets pulled toward the Moon. Because the Earth is spinning, and there is friction, the tidal bulge is farther east than the sublunar point. That means the Earth pulls the Moon ever so slightly forward in its orbit. If you accelerate an orbiting body, its orbit rises.
thank you for reply !
You can look at it in energy and momentum terms too. The moon causes the tidal bulge as others have said. The earth rotates under the bulge because it rotates faster than the moon orbits.
The drag of the tides slows the earth’s rotation. But angular momentum of a closed system has to be conserved - so the momentum has to transfer to the moon.
Ironically adding energy to the moon’s orbit raises its orbit and actually lengthens the orbital period. (But it also weakens the tidal effect.)
Btw, as an aside, the modern view is that our moon formed later than the Earth from a large collision with a Mars sized planetoid they call Theia.
I love this, wonderful job OP :)
oh my god, this is beautiful. you did such a good job with the lines and shading and everything. plus having a rat as the moon is just chef’s kiss
THIS IS SO NEAT
Earth's moon was formed from the aftermath of a collision with another planet. Because of this, the moon is made of a sharp and powdery igneous rock. The average composition of the Moon's lunar surface is 43% oxygen, 20% silicone, 19% magnesium, 10% iron, 3% calcium and aluminum. Hope this answers your question thank you very much
nope, its cheese.
But what type of cheese?
how was the moon formed?
Key Considerations on Moon Formation:
Giant Impact Hypothesis: The most widely accepted theory is that the Moon formed from debris resulting from a colossal impact between the early Earth and a Mars-sized body, often referred to as Theia, about 4.5 billion years ago.
Debris Accretion: After the impact, the debris from both Earth and Theia entered orbit around Earth. Over time, this debris coalesced to form the Moon.
Composition Similarities: The Moon's composition is similar to that of Earth's outer layers, supporting the idea that it originated from material ejected from Earth.
Orbital Dynamics: The Moon's current orbit and rotation are a result of gravitational interactions over billions of years, including tidal forces that have influenced its distance from Earth.
Alternative Theories: While the giant impact hypothesis is the most accepted, other theories include fission (the Moon split from a rapidly spinning Earth) and capture (the Moon was formed elsewhere and captured by Earth's gravity). However, these theories have less supporting evidence.
Takeaway: The giant impact hypothesis remains the leading explanation for the Moon's formation, providing a coherent understanding of its composition and orbital characteristics. Ongoing lunar exploration and research continue to refine our understanding of this process.
Get more comprehensive results summarized by our most cutting edge AI model. Plus deep Youtube search.