Essay 4 - The Origin of the Moon You learned that up until about 30 years ago, t

Question

Essay 4 - The Origin of the Moon

You learned that up until about 30 years ago, the origin of our Moon was hotly debated. This debate was eventually addressed in a conference where the participants narrowed down the possible formation scenarios to just four, and by the end of the conference, had zeroed in on just one theory for the Moon's formation. (1) List the four original theories proposed for the formation of the Moon and highlight the one theory that eventually prevailed. (2) Choose one of the three theories that failed and describe the reasons for its failure - in other words, discuss the constraints that it failed to address. Be sure to include details in your discussion.

Explanation / Answer

The following are the theories that have been proposed for the formation of the Moon:

The Fission Theory: It is believed that once the Moon was an integrated part of the Earth and eventually it separated from the Earth in about 4530 m.y. ago. The present region of Pacific Ocean basin might be the most probable site for the extraction of moon from the Earth.

The Capture Theory: The Moon was not the integral part of the Earth from its origin, and was later captured by the gravitational field of the Earth.

The Condensation Theory: Both the Moon and the Earth were condensed withtogether from its insitu nebula in the universe.

Although the orbital velocity with angular momentum conservation prevents the moon to collide with the Earth due to its gravity.

The Ejected Ring Theory: A planetesimal having a size of Planet Mars had a collision with the earth, and its impact resulted to the ejecting of large volumes of matter from the Earth. The ejected material revolved around the earth in form of a disk in an orbit. Eventually the material condensed and it formed the Moon in orbit around the Earth.

The Colliding Planetesimals Theory: The interaction of foreign planet which was in the earth orbiting and Sun-orbiting like any planetesimals extracts very large chunks of rock materials/ asteroids in the very early history of the Solar System and finally it led to their breakup. These debris material from the chunks formed The Moon by condensation.

2) Failure of capture theory : The moon was formed somewhere into the solar system where the amount of iron in composition was low, and then was captured into orbit around Earth.

BUt this theory got failure when moon's rocks showed the same isotope composition as the Earth.

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