Where Does The Moon Come From?

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Where does the moon come from? Did it emerge from the earth, or stolen by Venus? Could the moon really be made of green cheese after all? Humanity has for centuries held an interest and fascination with the sky above them. With planets named after gods in the early epochs and carvings of lunar cycles 25,000 years ago, it is surprising that a telescope wasn’t pointed at the moon until 1609 by the Italian astronomer Galileo. Humanity was held back by technology milestones that weren't reached until this century. Even then no theories of the moon’s history would be made until far after his death. The earliest scientific theories of the moon’s origin date to as recent as the late nineteenth century. In 1879, George H. Darwin was one …show more content…

By 1952, an American chemist named Harold C. Ulrey proposed the “Capture Theory.” Ulrey proposed that the moon, after being formed during the early stages of our solar system, was caught by earth’s gravity, either propelled from another system or one of our other planets. The Capture Theory, while easy to comprehend with a basic understanding of planetary physics, has had some complications, bringing into question its accuracy. In order for the moon to be captured by the earth’s gravity, both objects would have to be going at very slow speeds. Even still, the trajectory in which the moon could be captured does not match our current understanding of gravitation laws on larger scales. An external force would have to slow down the moon in order for it to be captured by the earth’s gravitation pull, which isn’t strong enough on its own to catch a planetoid that size without itself being affected. Some mathematicians have proposed different ways in which this external force was applied, including interference by a twelfth planet in our solar system. For this theory to be recognized, the moon should have a general material make-up that is different from the earth. Scientists needed to know whether the minerals on the moon matched the ones on earth, that way discovering if the moon came from the earth, or it is a visitor from some other part of the

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