The moon is one of the most important things in our solar system, and yet sometimes it doesn't get the credit it deserves in terms of its effects. Nor do a lot of people know about its true origins. Join us as we explore the birth of the moon and how it affects our planet! So where shall we begin? How about we talk about the stats of the moon, as you'll soon see, the moon is much more impressive than you might think. For example, how big is the moon in terms of its diameter? The answer to that is 2,159 miles across. Which means that the moon is bigger than Pluto, and also, it's the 5th largest moon in our solar system, which is impressive given all the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, etc. But also impressive is that this means the ratio in terms of size between the moon to the Earth is a mere 1:4. No other planet has that small of a ratio in regards to the relation of moon and planet (except technically Pluto...but few people count that as a planet anymore).
Now you might think, "Well why does a ratio matter? Does it really mean anything that it's a certain size compared to the Earth?" Why yes, yes it does matter. Because the bigger the object is, the more force it has to exert, or in this case, the more gravity it has to exert. The reason the moon is so important is due in part to its size. if it were much bigger, or much smaller, the Earth would literally not be the same.
Yet what might be the most curious thing about it is that we still don't know a lot about the moon in regards to certain elements. We have guesses, we have theories, and of course we have samples, but there are some facts that are not fully proven yet. For example...where did the moon come from exactly?
The formation of the universe is by and large one of the biggest and most important mysteries in all the world today. There are many explanations for what could have happened, or even what MIGHT have happened, but do we KNOW what happened? No, we don't, and that brings us to the moon. Because obviously the moon is out there, and obviously it has a big impact on our planet, but how it got up there, so close and yet far enough to help us is still a bit of a pickle to discern.
As of right now, there is one major theory that most scientists feel is the "right answer" in regards to the moon's birth. It's called the "giant impact" theory. To put it basically, when the solar system was being formed, a bunch of "celestial objects" were being made...you know, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, that kind of thing. But unlike the solar system we have right now, not everything was "tethered down" just yet. Which meant a lot of pieces were sent FLYING into the vast reaches of space. One of these bodies is believed to have been about the size of Mars, and it got thrown into, or just plain collided, with the Earth.
"When the young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs."
Despite the impressive explosive yield that this impact would've brought, it didn't wipe out the Earth, far from it. It merely jettisoned some parts of the Earth back into space. But because of the Earth's gravity, they stayed relatively close to one another. So after another couple million years, the moon was formed, and it eventually became locked to the Earth as we know it now.
And there are many who believe this for very basic reasons, one of which is that after we went to the moon via the Apollo missions and got a bunch of moon rocks, we found out that the composition of the moon and the Earth are very similar, incredibly similar in fact. Now sure, there are other logical explanations for this, including that the stuff that made the Earth and moon were from the same "pool of rocks" and so on and so forth. Many think though that the near identical natures of some of the elements prove that the moon came from the Earth. Which would give us an even greater connection to it than we had before.
But, there are also people who believe that because of certain differences on the moon that the impact theory isn't exactly fully explained:
"In terms of composition, the Earth and moon are almost twins, their compositions differing by at most few parts in a million," Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti, an astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, told Space.com. "This contradiction has cast a long shadow on the giant-impact model."
So what are the other theories? Well one is a bit like one I just mentioned, about Earth and the Moon coming from the "same pile of rocks", but it's not quite as simple as that. For in 2012, a group of NASA scientists proposed that the maybe the Earth and the moon were formed when two massive bodies collided with each other, and that wreckage formed both the Earth AND the moon at the same time..
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