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The Moon's heavily cratered far-side. The origin of the Moon is usually explained by a Mars-sized body striking the Earth, creating a debris ring that eventually collected into a single natural satellite, the Moon, but there are a number of variations on this giant-impact hypothesis, as well as alternative explanations, and research continues into how the Moon came to be formed.
Artist's depiction of a collision between two planetary bodies. Such an impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object likely formed the Moon.. The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Theia Impact, is an astrogeology hypothesis for the formation of the Moon first proposed in 1946 by Canadian geologist Reginald Daly.
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite.It orbits around Earth at an average distance of 384,400 km (238,900 mi), about 30 times the width of Earth. Tidal forces between Earth and the Moon have synchronized the Moon's orbital period (lunar month) with its rotation period at 29.5 Earth days, causing the same side of the Moon to always face Earth.
There was once a magma-filled ocean on the south pole of the moon, scientists recently discovered after analyzing lunar soil that revealed ancient information about the moon's origin. The study of ...
The energy required to melt the outer portion of the Moon is commonly attributed to a giant impact event that is postulated to have formed the Earth-Moon system, and the subsequent reaccretion of material in Earth orbit. Crystallization of this magma ocean would have given rise to a mafic mantle and a plagioclase-rich crust.
A similar "breathing earth" idea was considered by some Asian thinkers. [6] Plato reportedly believed that the tides were caused by water flowing in and out of undersea caverns. [3] Crates of Mallus attributed the tides to "the counter-movement (ἀντισπασμός) of the sea” and Apollodorus of Corcyra to "the refluxes from the Ocean". [7]
The Drake is part of the most voluminous ocean current in the world, with up to 5,300 million cubic feet flowing per second. Squeezed into the narrow passage, the current increases, traveling west ...
Atomic clocks, the kind we use to establish UTC on Earth, run ever so slightly faster on the moon, due to its lower gravity, and a more traditional solar model presents another set of problems ...