Moon's birth

Look at the night sky, your eyes would be caught by something giant, shiny full of light and dark patches. That is our Giant partner, The Moon. These dark-light patches were created during late-heavy bombardment(4.1 billion years ago ) due to collision with gaint asteroid. You can't even imagine that how The Moon came into existence ,even you do,you will end up guessing wrong . And its ending would be more worse and more dramatic . There are several theories about the Moon's birth and death but I will put the most authentic one. Here we go -

1. THE caught planet theory:- at first scientists saw moon as a caught planet. Scientists thought that in the early solar system moon was a roaming celestial body which was simply caught up by a much bigger body our earth . But this theory lost its validity as our exploration to the moon increased why? As when the scientists studied the deeper layers of the moon its original chemical composition was revealed. And what they found was overwhelming Moon had the exact chemical composition as earth does which was not possible for a roaming object to obtain. So this theory was thrown adding to the vast numbers of unsuccessful theories.

2. Theia earth collision hypothesis :- This theory also known as Opheus-Earth collision hypothesis this theory suggested that 4.5 billion years ago when when all young planets were in unstable orbits a random orbit planet Theia (Orpheus) which was equal to size of Mars collided with earth .

A huge mass of earth's debris (nearly 1/4 of todays earth) started orbiting it. And hence this huge chunk of debris made Our Moon . But wait this is not gonna be so simple there is a hidden twist which I will later.........

An animation on Theia moon hypothesis blue (earth) red-green (moon) black (theia) yellow (sun).

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Till the date this is the most authentic and natural theory about our Moon's birth.

But not only birth of Moon is a mystery.

Moon has many more mysteries .

We have never seen the far side of the moon from Earth!!! 7 October, 1959 was the date when Soviet probe LUNA-3 took first photos of its far side . 18 of them were resolvable , covering 1/3 of its surface.

Far side of the moon

image credit:NASA

Before this discovery scientists thought that the far side would be no better than the nearer side . But they were amazed to their sight. The far side had negligible pattern of dark-light patches as compared to the nearer side of The Moon, it was consistently white. Scientists found that the crust of far side of the moon was very very thick in proportion to the nearer side. This discovery forced scientists to propose A DOUBLE MOON THEORY

This theory stated that through THE collision of Theia lead to the formation of two Moons. One bigger and the other smaller.

........ those huge chunks of the earth's debris created two moon one big in size and the other smaller. Their orbiting speed would be different as their mass was different so you are smart enough to guess what would happen . They collided as a single moon which we see today. And this is how our Moon was formed . And scentist proposed that this collision of smaller and bigger moon would had been in slow motion and this collision would had thickened the far side. And thus giving it a smooth milky surface.

There is one more possibility that why the crust of the far side is thicker .

Tidal locking of Moon towards earth:-

This theory proposed that 4.5 billion yrs ago the moon was tidally locked towards the young earth and the earth would be too hot that time because of the Theia collision and thus making the crust of the nearer side thinner due to intense heat.

This moon is not gonna stay in the night sky fall long ,a time will come when moon will appear as a dot in the sky and will be visible from only one part of the earth we will talk about it in detail in the next blog.....

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