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Author Topic: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought  (Read 4031 times)

LethalByte

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Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought
« on: June 05, 2011, 03:05:21 AM »
Article on BBC News site about other Rocky Planets in the Universe having moons...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153

SandboxSpenc

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Re: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2011, 04:54:12 PM »
You know, earth's history is unique and I believe that a situation where an impact to a planet causes a moon to form is, as said, common. Though I still think that it is unlikely for a situation to occuor where a planet near the size of earth would get hit with just the right size of meteor to create a moon like ours, and that there is still a chance that the leftovers from the impact could form 2 moons that each together could be like ours.

My conclusion, I think it is common for a hit, but there are chances that it may not be the right size or the leftovers may turn out different. But thats just what I say. Together, I say the situation where a planet ends up near earths size with a moon that is very large is not common, but uncommon.

Bullethead

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Re: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought
« Reply #2 on: July 13, 2011, 09:28:02 PM »
My conclusion, I think it is common for a hit, but there are chances that it may not be the right size or the leftovers may turn out different. But thats just what I say. Together, I say the situation where a planet ends up near earths size with a moon that is very large is not common, but uncommon.

There's something I'm missing in this whole Moon-forging impact.  I've see the videos of it and it all looks like a neat idea, but I have to wonder this:  where are the other large moons in this solar system?

Mercury's got the Caloris crater.  Something hit Venus hard enough to reverse its rotation.  The entire northern hemisphere of Mars is 1 big crater.  Uranus got knocked on its side.  All of these were huge hits that seem on the same order of magnitude as that proposed for the formation of our Moon.  Even if they weren't QUITE right to do that, you'd think there'd be something pretty noticeable in orbit around those other planets today.  But Mercury and Venus have no moons at all, those of Mars seem to be captured asteroids, and Uranus' collection doesn't seem to add up to enough given the size of the hit it took.

Still, it does seem that impact is currently the best theory to account for our Moon and the size of Earth's iron core.  So either the parameters for the impact are extremely tight and therefore it's quite rare, or we don't know as much about the process as we think we do.  Or so it seems to me.

Omnigeek6

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Re: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought
« Reply #3 on: July 14, 2011, 02:21:45 PM »
My conclusion, I think it is common for a hit, but there are chances that it may not be the right size or the leftovers may turn out different. But thats just what I say. Together, I say the situation where a planet ends up near earths size with a moon that is very large is not common, but uncommon.

There's something I'm missing in this whole Moon-forging impact.  I've see the videos of it and it all looks like a neat idea, but I have to wonder this:  where are the other large moons in this solar system?

Mercury's got the Caloris crater.  Something hit Venus hard enough to reverse its rotation.  The entire northern hemisphere of Mars is 1 big crater.  Uranus got knocked on its side.  All of these were huge hits that seem on the same order of magnitude as that proposed for the formation of our Moon.  Even if they weren't QUITE right to do that, you'd think there'd be something pretty noticeable in orbit around those other planets today.  But Mercury and Venus have no moons at all, those of Mars seem to be captured asteroids, and Uranus' collection doesn't seem to add up to enough given the size of the hit it took.

Still, it does seem that impact is currently the best theory to account for our Moon and the size of Earth's iron core.  So either the parameters for the impact are extremely tight and therefore it's quite rare, or we don't know as much about the process as we think we do.  Or so it seems to me.

The Caloris Basin is a huge crater, but an impact capable of forming a large moon would have completely melted Mercury's crust.. However, an impact may have blown away much of the planet's outer layers, causing it to have an extremely large iron core. However, because Mercury is in a spin-orbit resonance, and thus has an extremely slow rotation, any satellite's orbit would tidally decay until it collided with its parent.

In general, I'd say that the parameters are fairly tight. Note that the statistic says: 1 in 10 rocky planets around sunlike stars may have moons like Earth's. Since we only have four terrestrial planets, the chance of at least one having a large moon is about 1 in 3. The chance of at least two having large moons, however, is more like 1 in 37.

Bullethead

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Re: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2011, 09:36:11 PM »
The Caloris Basin is a huge crater, but an impact capable of forming a large moon would have completely melted Mercury's crust.. However, an impact may have blown away much of the planet's outer layers, causing it to have an extremely large iron core. However, because Mercury is in a spin-orbit resonance, and thus has an extremely slow rotation, any satellite's orbit would tidally decay until it collided with its parent.

They say the Moon-making impact melted Earth, too.  I have no trouble believing that, so I don't have a problem with it happening to Mercury.  In fact, I think the melting is necessary in the moon-forming process via impact.

But you're quite right--Mercury is a real mystery.  It does seem reasonable to assume that something big whacked it long, long ago, blasting off the outer layers entirely and leaving its oversized iron core.  I'm pretty sure this would have melted everything, so Caloris happened much later, after Mercury had refrozen.  But what happened to all that outer material?  If it fell back to Mercury, then it would be there today and Mercury wouldn't be a nearly naked iron core, so it must have gone towards the Sun and either been eaten or tossed out of the solar system.

But that still leaves me with a question.  On the face of it (without knowing how to do the math), I'd expect that to boost all that stuff to Mercury's escape velocity would have required a very high-velocity impact.  Where did all that relative speed come from?  You'd think anything more or less sharing Mercury's orbit would have had pretty much the same vector (thanks to Kepler) so the impact would have been fairly low-speed (which is a worry I have with the Moon-creating crash on Earth).  I don't see much chance of a head-on collision due to (presumably) everything in the protostellar disk spinning the same way.  So that leaves a collision with a highly eccentric crossing object, the odds of which seem pretty remote.

And what about Venus and Mars?  For Venus, we can only speculate because of its fairly recent total surface repaving.  But with Mars, we can still see the utterly huge crater covering the northern hemisphere.  So where'd all that debris go?

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In general, I'd say that the parameters are fairly tight. Note that the statistic says: 1 in 10 rocky planets around sunlike stars may have moons like Earth's. Since we only have four terrestrial planets, the chance of at least one having a large moon is about 1 in 3. The chance of at least two having large moons, however, is more like 1 in 37.

1 in 10 seems pretty high to me.  But it's just a gut feeling.