- Scientists say that they’ve discovered it drifting away from us at a rate of 3.8cm each year.
It’s a very slow shift, but our Moon is drifting further away from the Earth every year. It’s hard to think of the Moon as different than we know in the night sky but it looks like it’s edging farther and it’s not stopping.
Who hasn’t looked up into the night sky and wondered what it’s like up there on the Moon? Thanks to incredible scientific advancement and brave pioneers, we have been on the Moon.
Currently, the powers at work are turning towards the possibility to live there one day. The thing is, if we do try to establish Moon colonies in space one day, problems could happen between different nations who want to make a claim on different parts of the Moon as their territory.
NASA has awarded contracts for the development of these technologies. They want construction of habitats and roads for the surface of our Moon.
However, people who live there should consider the length of their commute back to Earth. Scientists say that they’ve discovered it drifting away from us at a rate of 3.8cm each year.
The Moon moving away isn’t new though, and according to NASA, since the Moon is four and a half billion years old, it’s been trying to get rid of us for a while.
This discovery was made all in thanks to reflective panels that were installed on the Moon in 1969. The installation took place during the Apollo mission, allowing Nasa to measure the distance between the two.
However Professor Joshua Davies of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, research associate Margriet Lantink University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues from Utrecht University and the University of Geneva, what’s happening now is “a poor guide for the past.”
They say that if the Moon’s rate of recession had been constant, than it would have collided with the Earth 1.5 billion years ago. But that’s not possible as our Moon is three times older than that.
The science-y part is that it has something to do with ‘Milankovitch cycles.’ This is when small changes in the Earth’s orbit of the Sun change the amount of sunlight that the planet gets.
Our planet’s climate are very effected by these cycles that leave their evidence in the very ground itself. They researched the sediment to measure the Earth’s “wobble” and to figure out how far away the Moon was crazy amounts of time ago.
Those scientists say that 2.46 billion years ago the Moon was about 60,000km closer to the Earth than it is now, which would have resulted in 17 hours days on Earth.
Do you think we’ll ever live on our Moon?
Hits: 0
