Man in the Moon. Pfffft.
Everyone knows that it's a rabbit pounding rice for mochi.
NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) has apparently figured out the origin of the "Man in the Moon". According to the space agency's researchers, who published their findings in this week's edition of hefty boffinry mag Science, the distinctive almost-face-like marks on the Moon are "large, lava-filled, …
Its about the history of impacts, that maybe the MOON saved us from a lot of it, look at size of craters, super-impose that formation somewhere on google earth, over a populated area, we are lucky more of space crap doesn't hit us, we should pick all the rocks up, it's a Navigational Hazard anyway ...
If 4 billion years is accurate, the Earth wasn't even solid then.
The oldest dated terrestrial rocks are 3.8 billion years old. The oldest terrestrial zircon crystals are 4.3 billion years old. (Zircons crystallize out in even white-hot magma. They are harder than just about anything except diamond so they survive all subsequent geological processes except deep re-melting. Zircon can contain Uranium but not Lead impurities at formation, which allows accurate radio-isotope dating - any Lead in a Zircon must have started as Uranium when the zircon crystallized.)
> Not much of a shield, is it?
The moon: An immense TRACTOR BEAM GENERATOR cunningly disguised as a small, burnt-out ball of regolith and brimstone. To fake the gravitational effect, THE ENGINEERS did not forget to put an appropriately-sized BLACK HOLE at the HEART OF THIS ARTIFACT.
PUNY HUMAN!
@ Destroy All Monsters
Why would anyone care, you are a weazle who follows me around because I proved you where a idiot in couple of other posts, how old are you 12 ? Get a life .... People are opinions, just because you dont like them, is no reason to carry on like this, YOU child ...
@ Destroy All Monsters
Yes I see, ONLY Your Opinion counts, that what it is, I people say something you don't agree with you have one of your tantrums, well sorry this is a forum, people can say what they want, You don't need to say anything, or agree, only offer Your opinions, but you choose to bug/abuse me, well tuff, I am sticking around, because of You, I hate bully’s ......
No. When stuff comes into the atmosphere, most of it burns up, bar a few bigger pieces of rock (metal?) like the one in Russia earlier this year.
Also, the chance that something will hit the moon (if it's bound to hit either the earth or the moon) is miniscule. At least so it seems to me.
I can't see any face in enlargements like this or through a telescope, but I do when staring up at night - I presume it's largely because then I don't see the craters at all, just a collection of grey tones. But the relative contrast against the sky might also help with the illusion.
(Or the old fella is a sensitive as a small child to the presence of a photographer and always manages to blink or grimace precisely as the shutter finger descends)
Anyway kids growing up in the southern hemisphere are cruelly mislead by these stories, since upside down it really does look like the rabbit in the moon.
There are (at least) two 'men on the moon' depending on what culture you're talking about (every culture has it) and they're intermingled in a really strange way.
The 'standard' man on the moon looks like a palsied smiley face doodle: two round eyes and a round mouth, the edges of the moon disc form the head. The whole thing is about 14 degrees from straight up (hence the palsied part), if you could rotate the moon 14 degrees it would be easier to see. It is made with three of the enormous 'seas', not the smaller craters, you have to ignore the small craters.
The weird part, in Ireland, Scotland, parts of India, and a few Native American tribes they have a much more detailed man (or witch) who is walking bent over with a large bundle on his back, like the cover of that untitled Led Zeppelin album with the symbols. It is a rather detailed image that I had to have someone point out to me and it is weird that such disparate cultures share it. Some anthropologists use it as evidence, like Great Deluge stories, that there used to be more intermingling of cultures in the far distant past.
I think this article is based on a misreading. The source of the lunar maria (lava fill of impact craters) has been generally accepted for decades. The interesting new science is why the far side has very few maria compared with the face that we see. One theory was that the bombardment was somehow asymmetrical, it looks like GRAIL has contributed to providing us with a better answer.
Spin a bucket around at the end of a rope.
Allow several hundred people to randomly throw dyed water balloons at said bucket from any and all angles. Observe how much dye actually lands in said bucket, compared to what splatters onto the outside of the bucket and yourself, in the center of the system.
For fun, and charity purposes, fill the balloons with ketchup instead of water+dye.
> the nearside had a measure of protection. Only stands to reason
That might "stand to reason", but it's incorrect anyway. From TFA:
The climate of the Moon is also said to have played a part in the formation of its features. The researchers believe that because the near side of the Moon was warm enough to produce a thinner crust which allowed for larger impacts. As a result, the craters in the near side are said to be as much as twice the size of their counterparts on the far side of the Moon.
It's the nearside - which you claim is "protected" - that has the bigger impact craters...
Vic.
There is only one problem with your argument. Your "impact craters" on the nearside aren't a result of impact. Rather, they are a result of the moon's internal vulcanism.
I rather suspect the farside had similar features soon after tidal-lock set in.
The phrase "are said to be" doth not scientific proof make.
Try to educate yourself, Vic. Here's a starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_maria
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Wiki sucks. But it's got some good links.
Again, see my reply to Chris Miller, above.
Not a professional, just an amateur. See these two posts:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1432149
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1433296
The 20 inch is a work in progress ... and again, the Wife is fascinated :-)
> Are you really incapable of reading for content, Vic?
One of us is.
> I'm not arguing, I'm discussing
In this post, you said :-
Your "impact craters" on the nearside aren't a result of impact.
That's not discussion. That's assertion.
> Professionals are not infallible.
Indeed they are not. But when challenging a professional, it's always useful to provide some substantiation when stating baldly that he is wrong. You have provided no such substantiation, nor have you demonstrated any credentials in the field in question. Thus your opinion carries very little weight in opposition to someone who does this as a day job. If you want to gain that gravitas, you'll need to provide some justification for your contrary position.
Vic.
The reason that the near side has so much maria is because it took a lot of nuclear bombs launched from earth to finally nudge the moon into a tidally locked orbit so that the tidal motion of the moon would cause earth's oceans to form life and then have the life migrate to land.
The real question is who did this?
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...That's why we've got Cancer.
Would it be fair to say that the Moon is a GIGANTIC RADIATION SPONGE?
As far as i can see, all it's been doing for the past few billion years, is sitting
on it's arse getting the "Mother of all Sun Tans". You would probably stand
less chance of getting Cancer cleaning out the ' HOT ROOM' at Three Mile
Island with your tongue than you would setting foot on that particular hot rock.
I could be wrong....probably am
so why is the near side crust warmer so it had bigger splashes preserved ? Alternatively, did big impactor bombardment on near side last less than 2 weeks ? The other side copped routine impacts. Not standard historical speculation, but what is demonstratable flaw in this model?
question: if the center of mass of the moon is not at its geometric center, will tidal friction cause it to orient itself so the center of mass is closer to earth?
i suggest that the moon gathered more early solar system material on the "forward" face relative to its direction of motion, then later that side reoriented to point at the earth due to tidal forces. this would explain that there are more (and larger) craters on one face, and also that that face is pointed at the earth.
an imbalance in the center of mass would normally work itself out in a large enough planet body, but only because the heat cause by accretion would be enough to melt the core. if the moon's accretion never built up enough heat, it could have retained an offset center of mass that resulted in the way it was formed.
Isn't the crucial point that the Moon's density is higher on the side facing the Earth. Presumably, its the orbit and rotation having been locked for some while, the denser components have been steadily pulled more strongly towards and hence migrated towards the Earth-facing side.
Because the denser materials include most of the radioactive ones this side is a bit warmer than the far side.
I've been saying for decades that I'd happily have a container of radioactive waste in my garden that could provide background heating. It might not keep the asteroids at bay but at least it would help when winter comes along.
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"Moon was warm enough to produce a thinner crust which allowed for larger impacts. "
Should read:
"Moon was warm enough to produce a thinner crust which allowed for larger craters."
I'd mention cart before the horse, or some such but you get the idea. The thinner crust did not attract asteroids, thus did not attract larger impacts. It did allow for larger craters though, or for the effects to be move visibly prominent. I'd guess the original paper did not put it that way, and it's probably just an error in the type up.
Thanks!
The moon stabilizes the axis of rotation of the earth, allowing for less extreme winter/summer climate fluctuations (on a timescale of O(10^5) years. It's also possible that lunar tidal drag is critical for maintaining the geo-dynamo, without which the solar wind would have stripped Earth's atmosphere leaving this planet like a hotter Mars. This latter is speculative, because the workings of the geo-dynamo are not well-understood (It's very hard to take a closer look at it :-)