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The Moon (Earth's Moon)

The number of discretely identified lunar craters is more than a dozen times greater as a result of recent Chinese analysis of lunar orbiter data. Some of the newly identified craters are quite large.
Moon has way (way) more craters than we thought

The moon has many more craters than we thought, a new study finds.

More than 109,000 new craters were discovered in the low- and mid-latitude regions of the moon using artificial intelligence (AI) that was fed data collected by Chinese lunar orbiters.

The number of craters recorded on the moon's surface is now more than a dozen times larger than it was before. The findings were published Dec. 22 in the journal Nature Communications.

"It is the largest lunar crater database with automatic extraction for the mid- and low-latitude regions of the moon," study lead author Chen Yang, an associate professor of Earth sciences at Jilin University in China, told Live Science in an email. ...

Yang and her team approached these issues with machine learning. They trained a deep neural network (where a computer uses layers of mathematical calculations that feed into each other) with data from thousands of previously identified craters and taught the algorithm to find new ones. The network was then applied to data collected by the Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 lunar orbiters, revealing 109,956 additional craters on the moon's surface. ...

A substantial number of the craters identified in this study are classed as being "small" to "medium" in size, though from an Earthling's perspective, they are still quite large, ranging from 0.6 miles to 60 miles (1 to 100 kilometers) in diameter. The craters' relatively small size is likely why they weren't detected before.

But the AI program also spotted much larger, irregularly-shaped craters that had eroded — some of those were up to 341 miles (550 km) in diameter. ...

FULL STORY (With Illustrations):
https://www.livescience.com/new-moon-craters-discovered

PUBLISHED RESEARCH ARTICLE:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20215-y
 
Well, this is news ... The moon trails a persistent 'tail' of irradiated sodium atoms blasted off it by meteor strikes, and the earth passes through the moon's tail each month.
The moon has a tail, and Earth wears it like a scarf once a month

Like a comet soaring through the cosmos, the moon is followed by a slender tail of irradiated matter — and Earth passes directly through it once a month.

According to a study published March 3 in the journal JGR Planets, the lunar tail is made of millions of sodium atoms blasted out of the lunar soil and into space by meteor strikes and then pushed hundreds of thousands of miles downstream by solar radiation. For a few days a month, when the new moon sits between Earth and the sun, our planet's gravity drags that sodium tail into a long beam that wraps around Earth's atmosphere before blasting into space on the opposite side.

The lunar tail is harmless and invisible to the naked eye. During those few new-moon days each month, however, the beam becomes visible to high-powered telescopes that can detect the faint orange glow of sodium in the sky. According to the study's authors, the beam then appears as a fuzzy, glowing spot in the sky opposite the sun, about five times the diameter of the full moon and 50 times dimmer than human eyes can perceive.

Researchers first detected this "sodium spot" in the 1990s. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/moon-has-a-sodium-tail.html
 
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Well, this is news ... The moon trails a persistent 'tail' of irradiated sodium atoms blasted off it by meteor strikes, and the earth passes through the moon's tail each month.


FULL STORY: Like a comet soaring through the cosmos, the moon is followed by a slender tail of irradiated matter — and Earth passes directly through it once a month.
Do you have a reference for this?

Thanks
 
interesting!
I wonder what the red dots are in this image?
1615458074692.png

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I've found out 'Eburacum,' that I believe they are called 'Interior Quake Nests?'
 
In 2009 a moon satellite doing reconnaissance found the unthinkable.

Moon craters in the South Pole that never see the sun are the coldest spot in our solar system.

It is a minus 240 C.

This is 33 degrees above absolute and 10 degrees colder than Pluto.
 
A lot in the news today about how the Earth's Moon will wobble in the 2030s and create global floods. Just heard Professor Brian Cox on the radio saying that's not quite accurate: what will cause the floods is climate change making the sea levels rise, combined with the Moon wobble that happens every 16 years or so anyway, and has done for billions of years.

So it's not the Moon that's the problem, it's global warming. In short, don't blow up the Moon.
 
A lot in the news today about how the Earth's Moon will wobble in the 2030s and create global floods. Just heard Professor Brian Cox on the radio saying that's not quite accurate: what will cause the floods is climate change making the sea levels rise, combined with the Moon wobble that happens every 16 years or so anyway, and has done for billions of years.

So it's not the Moon that's the problem, it's global warming. In short, don't blow up the Moon.
I believe I'm right in suggesting that our world also wobbles, might be a wobbly future ahead!:actw:
 
Here's the article on the moon wobble. As usual, someone else wrote the headline for impact, not exactness.
In other words, don't build near the coast.

A 'wobble' in the moon's orbit could result in record flooding in the 2030s, new study finds​

The entire US coastline is in for a one-two punch from the lunar cycle and climate change.
https://www.livescience.com/high-tide-flooding-climate-change-2030
 
Still my favourite moon fact (discuss...)
View attachment 42318

The 8,000x higher bit is.. intriguing, I'm sure the maths works, but that's some serious sloshing about.
That certainly is a very big figure, if I've worked that out right (questionable) the highest figure taking the lowest tide (2ft) is 16,000 ft, on the highest tide (52ft) works out at 416,000 ft! An astonishing figure indeed!

Using figures for present time ~

Screenshot 2021-07-20 173723.jpg
Though I'm wondering if the 'Oceans' of the Earth might have been frozen with solid ice?
 
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That certainly is a very big figure, if I've worked that out right (questionable) the highest figure taking the lowest tide (2ft) is 16,000 ft, on the highest tide (52ft) works out at 416,000 ft! An astonishing figure indeed!

Using figures for present time ~

View attachment 42325
Though I'm wondering if the 'Oceans' of the Earth might have been frozen with solid ice?
416,000 ft is close to 79 miles..
 
That certainly is a very big figure, if I've worked that out right (questionable) the highest figure taking the lowest tide (2ft) is 16,000 ft, on the highest tide (52ft) works out at 416,000 ft! An astonishing figure indeed!

Using figures for present time ~

View attachment 42325
Though I'm wondering if the 'Oceans' of the Earth might have been frozen with solid ice?
That might explain why sedimentary rock is quite high up in some places. I'd always thought it was caused by subduction and mountains clashing, but this is new to me.
 
A question for all the science nerds.....on what axis does the moon rotate? I know it spins slowly which is why we always see the same face more or less as it orbits earth and is tidal locked with earth. But is it a north south rotation or east west or at an angle or what?
None of the science links seem to specify this.
:thought:
 
A question for all the science nerds.....on what axis does the moon rotate? I know it spins slowly which is why we always see the same face more or less as it orbits earth and is tidal locked with earth. But is it a north south rotation or east west or at an angle or what?
None of the science links seem to specify this.
:thought:
If this helps to somehow try and explain it. . . though I'm certainly no 'science nerdy,' far from it in fact 'dr wu'.
As I understand it, I
may be right in saying that as we always see the same face of the Moon - then it's orbit must surely follow that of the Earths. The disappearance of the Moon at certain times, of each month, I believe, it's all down to the Earth's wobble - as well as that of the Moon, therefore falling out of phase when disappearing from view in different parts of the World ~ or something like that.
 
If this helps to somehow try and explain it. . . though I'm certainly no 'science nerdy,' far from it in fact 'dr wu'.
As I understand it, I
may be right in saying that as we always see the same face of the Moon - then it's orbit must surely follow that of the Earths. The disappearance of the Moon at certain times, of each month, I believe, it's all down to the Earth's wobble - as well as that of the Moon, therefore falling out of phase when disappearing from view in different parts of the World ~ or something like that.
Yes..but that was not my question. What axis does the moon rotate on? North south, east west or oblique..? The or bit is not the sole issue ,the very slow spin of the moon is why we don't see a different side.
 
The moon's axis of rotation is roughly perpendicular to its apparent path across our sky (eastward / westward).

The moon's rotational axis is not exactly parallel to the earth's rotational axis because the moon's orbit is inclined circa 5 degrees off the earth's equatorial plane.
 
So it rotates around a vertical axis that is more or less north and south 'pole'...?
.
 
The high tides on Early Earth were spectacular, but didn't last very long on a geological timescale. A few tens of thousands of years later they were already much smaller.

Earth was very different, too; the day was only 4 hours long, and was extremely flattened at the poles, becoming an oblate spheroid. Gravity was less than three quarters as strong at the equator as it was at the poles, due to centrifugal force.
mollweide.gif

(my image)

The Earth and Moon were still quite hot immediately after the impact, so these high tides would have been accompanied by a thick steam atmosphere- not somewhere to choose for a holiday. And no oxygen to speak of- life could not emerge on this hot steamy centrifuge of a planet.

From here
http://www.iea.usp.br/en/news/when-a-day-lasted-only-four-hours
After all, how long did a day last when the Earth and the Moon came to be? "At first, the Moon was at a distance of three times the Earth's radius, immediately after the Roche limit. With this distance and the estimated angular momentum, it can be said that the day lasted only 4 hours. Over time, the Moon moved away and the length of the day increased: when the planet and its satellite were 30,000 years old, the day lasted six hours; when they were 60 million years old, the day lasted 10 hours."
At the end of his presentation, Sasaki presented a graph relating the development of life ("though not an expert on the issue") with the length of the day through time. According to it, the first evidence of life, 3.5 billion years ago, happened when the day lasted 12 hours. The emergence of photosynthesis, 2.5 billion years ago, happened when the day lasted 18 hours. 1.7 billion years ago the day was 21 hours long and the eukaryotic cells emerged. The multicellular life began when the day lasted 23 hours, 1.2 billion years ago. The first human ancestors arose 4 million years ago, when the day was already very close to 24 hours long.
 
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