Have you ever wondered why during a solar eclipse the face of the moon fits exactly over the surface of the sun?
It’s because the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun and it sits 1/400th of the distance between the sun and the earth.
The moon also mirrors precisely the annual movement of the sun.
A midsummer full moon will set at the same angle and place on the horizon as a midwinter sunset.
Cosmologists aren’t sure how the moon formed. It’s a bit crazy but, the current popular theory is called the “Big Whack”!
It poses that some object the size of Mars impacted with the earth early in its formation and knocked a big chunk off into earth’s orbit and that became the moon!
There are two problems with that though. If that happened, all astronomers agree that such a planet-sized impact would have set the earth spinning faster than it does today. To compensate for that and to make their theory work, they hypothesized that a second impact to earth—this time striking from the opposite side—happened, thereby slowing the earth back down.
Sometimes the theories take more suspension of disbelief than saying the moon was created by a higher power. But even astronomers admit there is no evidence that such an impact (or two) has ever taken place.
The other problem with the Big Whack theory concerns the strange amount of material ejected from the earth that coalesced into our moon. The earth has a circumference precisely 366% larger than the moon—almost the same amount of days in a year. Even though we rounded that number down to 360 for our calendar year, the earth rotates 366 times during one trip around the sun.
Because of that, the Minoan astronomer-priests of Crete divided a circle into 366 degrees. As did the Sumerians, who further divided the degrees into 60 minutes and subdividing those minutes into 60 seconds.
The moon is lighter in mass than we once expected it would be. Its gravitational field has stronger and weaker patches and its core is abnormally small.
The moon and its mysteries will forever keep us wondering how, why, when….who?
