08:54 p.m
Saturday 05 October 2024
There is nothing else like Earth and its moon in the entire solar system. Other planets have many moons, or none at all, but the popularity of our world and its large moon is unique.
Currently, the main theory is that the moon is either a child of the Earth or her brother – born from the same material in the same region of the solar system.
New research challenges this idea, suggesting that the moon could have been taken over, born elsewhere in the solar system only to be taken away. in later with the force of Earth’s gravity, Science Alert reports.
Astronomers Darren Williams and Michael Zuger of Pennsylvania State University crunched some numbers and found that gravitational pulls are possible for terrestrial planets like Earth, so this could be the source of the the earth-moon system we see today.
We have ample evidence that the Earth and its moon are made of the same basic material. The mineral composition of both is exactly what you would expect if they were formed from the same material.
The main explanation for this probability is the large impact hypothesis: something large crashed into the Earth and the resulting debris coalesced to form a planet and the moon.
There are other ways that two things could end up in the same composition. It may have formed in a planetary evaporation cloud, known as synestia, or it may have formed at the same time from the same dust cloud that surrounds the Sun as Earth.
But there’s more than one way to get to the moon, as we’ve seen elsewhere in the solar system. If two objects pass each other at the right angle and distance, they can become gravitationally bound together and end up in a stable long-term orbit.
A special situation that may apply to the Earth and the Moon is called a binary eclipse. In this situation, two objects bound by gravity pass a third object. This third object picks up a member of the binary pair, separates them and keeps the binary partner for itself.
We know that there are many binary objects in the solar system; We find binary and even triple asteroids, for example. There is even evidence that this gravitational interaction between the three objects brought about a fateful hold, with Neptune’s moon Triton. Triton orbits Neptune in the opposite direction to the rest of Neptune’s moons, and at a different angle, indicating that it was pulled from the Kuiper belt into an unstable Neptunian orbit.
The moon’s orbit around Earth is not in the same plane with the equator as you would expect from the origin of the debris cloud, Williams and Zuger say. So, they did a set of mathematical modeling to determine if a Moon-sized object could be captured by an Earth-sized object.
According to the calculations, Earth may have caught something bigger – a Mercury or even Mars-sized object – even if its orbit was unstable. But something the size of the moon probably ended up in an elliptical orbit that became more circular over time, and eventually started moving away at the same rate as the moon now, about 3.8 centimeters in the year.
So, it is possible. But is it possible? Still other features – such as similarities between minerals and isotopes – are more consistent with a closer relationship between the two than a trapping condition would allow.
“No one knows how the moon formed,” Williams says.
The research was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
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