When's the last time you thanked the moon?
Many people really take it for granted, they just assume it's been Earth's buddy forever. But do you know that if it weren't for the moon, we wouldn't be here today? 👆
http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/nearmoon.htm
Moon Created Following Collision Of Planets
[Original headline: Cosmic Crash Melted Earth, Created Moon, Study Says]London (Bloomberg) -- More than 4 billion years ago, the young Earth collided with an object the size of Mars at more than 30 times the speed of sound, slinging enough debris into orbit to create the moon, researchers said.
The cataclysmic crash, described in a paper in tomorrow's edition of Nature, lasted 24 hours when the planets' orbits crossed, generating a force sufficient to melt the Earth and vaporize the other planet.
About a century later, the resulting cloud of dust coalesced into the moon, a satellite that would alter the planet's development for billions of years. The impact created a rapidly spinning Earth and a moon large enough to keep the planet from wobbling as it circled the sun, two of the factors that helped the planet develop a climate suitable for life.
``If not for our moon, the Earth would not be the habitable planet we have today,'' said Robin Canup, a researcher at the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute and the co-author of the Nature paper. ``It brings those back to the broader issue of how common are habitable planets in the universe.''
Canup and co-author Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz harnessed modern computing power to recreate an impact that would account for the Earth's moon. The task was formidable, even with today's technology.
``Computer simulations of a planetary-scale impact is not a task for faint-hearted, point-and-click computer modelers,'' said University of Arizona researcher Jay Melosh in an editorial that accompanied the study. Any model had to take into account the complex gravitational interactions of ``all those hot fluids squirting around in space,'' he said.
Still, Melosh said even more precise models might be possible in the future, noting that Canup and Asphaug's research didn't take into account the different ways that solids, liquids and gases behave.
Ancient Mystery
The question of how the moon formed has vexed scientists for decades. The first theories on how the moon formed were shattered by the moon missions of the 1970s, which found that lunar rocks, unlike the Earth and the rest of the inner solar system, had little iron. That meant that moon wasn't likely to have been formed by the same process that created the Earth.The data prompted a Harvard astrophysicist to propose the ``giant impact'' theory a quarter-century ago, suggesting the moon was formed when a partially formed Earth collided with another object, throwing off material.
Early computer simulations weren't powerful enough to analyze the complex interactions of two massive objects slamming into each other in space, making it difficult to accurately predict how that crash happened.
Isn't that amazing? That in the unimaginable vastness of space, a perfectly sized planet was on a direct bullseye collision with earth that struck it exactly with the needed force to vaporise the other planet and coincidently create our moon? The very moon that stabilised our planet and made life on earth possible?
The statistics and probabilities are outrageously insane to suggest that these were random chance coincidences.
I really dont see how anyone can deny that there is not intelligence behind the creation of the universe and especially our planet. To assume that life is the result of infinite, impossibly improbable chance coincidences is to ignore common sense and reason.
Our minds cannot possibly phantom that which is truly "god", its certainly not the god described in the holy books. To me god is that indescribable energy which is responsible for the big bang, the physics that govern the universe and the nature that spawned life and its evolution.
But irregardless if you believe in god or not, thank the moon. 🙂