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The Moon's heavily cratered far-side. The origin of the Moon is usually explained by a Mars-sized body striking the Earth, creating a debris ring that eventually collected into a single natural satellite, the Moon, but there are a number of variations on this giant-impact hypothesis, as well as alternative explanations, and research continues into how the Moon came to be formed.
The concept of a spherical Earth displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth: In early Mesopotamian mythology, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean with a hemispherical sky-dome above, [10] and this forms the premise for early world maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus.
The Monge gauge has two obvious limitations: If the average surface is not plane, then the Monge gauge only makes sense on length scales smaller than the curvature of the average surface. And the Monge gauge fails completely if the surface is so strongly bent that there are overhangs (points x,y corresponding to more than one z).
Artist's depiction of a collision between two planetary bodies. Such an impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object likely formed the Moon.. The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Theia Impact, is an astrogeology hypothesis for the formation of the Moon first proposed in 1946 by Canadian geologist Reginald Daly.
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite, orbiting at an average distance of 384 399 km (238,854 mi; 30 Earths across).It faces Earth always with the same side.This is a result of Earth's gravitational pull having synchronized the Moon's rotation period with its orbital period (lunar month) of 29.5 Earth days.
Monge is a lunar impact crater that lies along the southwestern edge of the Mare Fecunditatis. It was named after French mathematician Gaspard Monge . [ 1 ] The outer rim is somewhat irregular in shape, with an outward bulge to the east and smaller bulges to the north and northwest.
Astronauts in low Earth orbit can personally see the curvature of the planet, and travel all the way around several times a day. The astronauts who travelled to the Moon have seen the entire Moon-facing half at once, and can watch the sphere rotate once a day (approximately; the Moon is also moving with respect to Earth).
Theories for the formation of the Moon must explain its late formation as well as the following facts. First, the Moon has a low density (3.3 times that of water, compared to 5.5 for Earth [49]) and a small metallic core. Second, Earth and Moon have the same oxygen isotopic signature (relative abundance of the