I love your blog and your space asks but please pray tell what's the moon boom that jumpingjacktrash mentioned?
have you ever looked up into the night sky and wondered, why the moon is?
well, you’re not alone! scientists and learnéd scholars across the ages have been baffled by our celestial neighbor.
WHY, is our Moon so proportionally fucking huge? (it’s more than a quarter the size of the Earth! that’s COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE AND BLOWS EVERY OTHER MOON IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM OUT OF THE METAPHORICAL WATER)
WHY, is the Moon made up of much of the same materials as the Earth?
and WHY, is Earth’s magnetic field so massively overpowered that it can shield the surface from interstellar and solar radiation, allowing life to develop and paving the way for you to even ask these questions in the first place? (that one might not sound related, but I promise you it is so just bear with me)
well, it all comes down to the Theia Impact Hypothesis, or, OPERATION MOON BOOM.
in this fair solar system we lay our scene, four and a half billion years ago.
here, we focus on the third planet from the sun, which is, surprisingly, NOT Earth.
no, this unnamed rocky world is slightly smaller than Venus, and is formed of mostly-molten rock that’s still settling into itself as our nascent solar system sorts itself out.
Theia is a rocky planetoid about the size of Mars, on a wild and unstable orbit around the Sun that regularly brings it within spitting distance of our unnamed third rock! and today, it will get A Bit Too Close.
the two planets slam into each other with wild disregard for road safety, disintegrating their outer layers into a massive debris field that will take hundreds of millions of years to settle and fusing their planetary cores together into a single rough oblong of molten iron! BAM! WHAPPO!
but settle the debris does, as gravity takes a gentle but firm hold of this huge mess and gradually reshapes it into two familiar faces…
ENTER STAGE RIGHT: EARTH AND MOON.
that’s right, you’re standing on top of the alchemically-fused corpses of, not one, but TWO planets right now! our newly-reborn Earth and its singular orbiting satellite are formed from the same debris field and share a lot of similar material. and because the Moon was Made, and not a domesticated planetoid that wandered too close and got trapped in the orbit of a larger body, it’s just ludicrously HUGE compared to its partner.
and getting back to that magnetic field thing, the whole reason Earth Can Have Big Field Pls is because Theia dumped so much extra iron into the Core that it generates a MUCH more powerful field than our neighboring planets, even the ones that are just slightly smaller than Earth!
the only reason that life can exist at all is because Theia took one for the team and reshaped the solar system.
so the next time you look up into the celestial dome and spot our closest neighbor, raise a salute to Theia, gone but not forgotten.
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