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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 13 2020, @09:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the moonies dept.

How the moon formed: New research sheds light on what happened:

How the Earth got its moon is a long debated question. The giant impact theory – which states that the moon formed from the a collision between the early Earth and a rocky body called Theia—has become the front runner among the explanations. But the details around how this happened are blurry and there are many observations that scientists are still struggling to explain.

Now a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, has shed light on what actually happened by solving one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the crash—why the moon ended up being nearly identical to Earth, rather than Theia, assuming she existed.

According to the giant impact theory, Theia was a body roughly the size of Mars or smaller—half the diameter of Earth. It smashed into the developing Earth 4.5 billion years ago. This collision produced enough heat to create magma oceans and ejected a lot of debris into orbit around the Earth, which subsequently coalesced into the moon.

The theory explains the way and the speed which the Earth and moon spin around each other. They are tidally locked, which means that the moon always shows the same side towards Earth as it spins around it. This is why it was such an achievement when the Chinese landed their Chang'e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the moon in 2019—direct communications with that side are never possible from Earth.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @12:09PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @12:09PM (#970648)

    Put a satellite into place to provide a relay to the other side of the moon instead of trying to send the signal through solid rock?

    0  - Earth
      \
       *  - relay
      /
    o   - Moon
    ^ - Vehicle

    If our engineers can't even work this out what hope for us is there?

  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @12:18PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @12:18PM (#970651)

    "Through a relay" isn't "direct", n'est pas?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by dwilson on Friday March 13 2020, @05:34PM

      by dwilson (2599) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 13 2020, @05:34PM (#970780) Journal

      That's just splitting hairs, and I think you know it.

      If I write some scripts on a server directly via a keyboard, then pack it up and mail it to it's destination, I'm relying on the scripting I did to complete the set-up once it boot's there.

      If I can reach a tty via ssh, whether it's over my lan or over the internet, I'm in direct control and can complete the setup myself.

      As far as the purposes of Command & Control go, yes, through a relay is very much 'direct'. The alternative is 'indirect': Relying on unsupervised automation.

      --
      - D
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday March 13 2020, @01:14PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 13 2020, @01:14PM (#970676) Journal

    Of course the engineers did work that out; otherwise, how would they have communicated with the landed spacecraft at all?

    From the last link in the summary:

    So the landers must communicate with Earth using a relay satellite named Queqiao - or Magpie Bridge - launched by China last May.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @02:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 14 2020, @02:49AM (#970995)

      Are you seriously asking people to RTFA?
      You must be new here...

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Saturday March 14 2020, @06:03AM

    by dry (223) on Saturday March 14 2020, @06:03AM (#971057) Journal

    The other problem with the summary is that the Moon likely was not tidally locked upon formation. Tides locked it, perhaps fairly quickly.
    Tides also pushed the Moon away. Imagine when the Moon was perhaps 50k miles away, filling half the sky, and the mile high tides, wonder how much that drove evolution.