The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.
A boon for life
The gravitational pull of the moon moderates Earth's wobble, keeping the climate stable. That's a boon for life. Without it, we could have enormous climate mood swings over billions of years, with different areas getting extraordinarily hot and then plunging into long ice ages.
It is the pull of the Moon's gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth's tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).
According to Tom, there are three main ways in which the Moon impacts on life: time, tides and light. 'For many animals, particularly birds, the Moon is essential to migration and navigation. Other will time their reproduction to coincide with the specific phases of the lunar cycle. '
As the average length of women's menstrual cycles matches the moon's 29.5-day waxing and waning cycle, many cultures associated the moon with fertility. The celestial body's influence on humans biology had largely been dismissed as myth, but several recent studies have linked lunar phases with sleep and moods.
The Moon and Earth exert a gravitational pull on each other. On Earth, the Moon's gravitational pull causes the oceans to bulge out on both the side closest to the Moon and the side farthest from the Moon. These bulges create high tides. The low points are where low tides occur.
Before Earth and the Moon, there were proto-Earth and Theia (a roughly Mars-sized planet). The giant-impact model suggests that at some point in Earth's very early history, these two bodies collided.
The Moon's magnetic field acted as a second shield to protect the Earth's atmosphere from the volatile young Sun. This finding has important implications for the search for extraterrestrial life outside of our solar system.
The average composition of the lunar surface by weight is roughly 43% oxygen, 20% silicon, 19% magnesium, 10% iron, 3% calcium, 3% aluminum, 0.42% chromium, 0.18% titanium and 0.12% manganese. Orbiting spacecraft have found traces of water on the lunar surface that may have originated from deep underground.
If Earth were to stop spinning but continue to orbit the sun, a "day" would last half a year, and so would the night. It could warm up much more during the day and cool down much more during the night. This would affect the climate on Earth.
Without the stabilising tidal drag from a single moon, the Earth's axial tilt will wobble far more than it does now. Over tens of thousands of years, Earth could tilt all the way past 45°, so that most of one hemisphere faces the Sun continuously, and the other is in perpetual darkness.
While the Lunar surface is hostile to life as we know it, a deep Lunar biosphere (or that of similar bodies) cannot yet be ruled out deep exploration would be required for confirmation.
Galileo's discoveries about the Moon, Jupiter's moons, Venus, and sunspots supported the idea that the Sun - not the Earth - was the center of the Universe, as was commonly believed at the time. Galileo's work laid the foundation for today's modern space probes and telescopes.
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The first animals to orbit the moon and return to Earth were two Russian tortoises aboard Zond 5. On 15 September 1968, the tortoises were launched with plants, seeds and bacteria around the moon and returned to Earth seven days later.
The Earth formed over 4.6 billion years ago out of a mixture of dust and gas around the young sun. It grew larger thanks to countless collisions between dust particles, asteroids, and other growing planets, including one last giant impact that threw enough rock, gas, and dust into space to form the moon.
The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago. Earth's Moon is the only place beyond Earth where humans have set foot, so far.
Earth's moon does have a name: In English, it's "the moon." The word moon is Proto-Germanic in origin, deriving from a similar-sounding word that came into use a few thousand years ago in Northern Europe.
Seventeenth-century English farmers believed in a "dripping moon," which supplied rain depending on whether its crescent was tilted up or down. Now scientists have found evidence for another adage: Rain follows the full and new phases of the moon.
In full sunshine, temperatures on the Moon reach 127°C, way above boiling point. There are 13 and a half days of high temperatures followed by 13 and a half days of darkness, and once the Sun goes down the temperature at the bottom of craters can plummet to -173°C.