Hello people, tune in each week of 2023 for one of the best in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, dropped at you by Celestron.
This week, we’ll focus on the formation of Earth’s solely pure satellite, the Moon! Once we search for on the night time sky, it is easy to see the Moon and assume it is all the time been there. However that is not the case.
About 4.5 billion years in the past, a Mars-sized physique known as Theia catastrophically struck Earth, throwing out a hoop of fabric that finally accreted into the Moon. (Theia is the title of a Greek goddess who was the mom of one other Greek goddess, Selene, the Goddess of the Moon.)
We all know this collision occurred as a result of within the Nineteen Seventies, two planetary astronomers — Invoice Hartmann and Don Davis — figured it out. They reached this conclusion largely by evaluating lunar rocks collected throughout the Apollo missions to Earth rocks. They discovered that the isotopes (totally different types of the identical aspect) in each rocks had been largely similar, indicating they’d a typical origin.
This led to what’s now known as the Big Affect Speculation, which explains a variety of issues concerning the Earth-Moon system. These embrace Earth’s spin, the Moon’s orbit, the excessive angular momentum of the system, the proof that the Moon was as soon as molten, the Moon’s small iron core, and, in fact, these isotopic similarities between Earth and Moon rocks.
If the Big Affect Speculation is true, then the following logical query is to ask: “What occurred to Theia?” Effectively, you are standing on it now! A lot of the Mars-sized impactor truly received absorbed into Earth. Fairly wild, proper?
For extra data on the Big Affect Speculation and the Moon’s formation, see right here: https://astronomy.com/magazine/2019/11/the-moons-violent-origin
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