How Did The Moon Form?

How did the Earth get such a weird, big fluffy moon?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
You know, I look up at the sky at night,
and one of the most amazing things to stare at
as the moon, because it just seems so calm and peaceful,
hanging up there in the sky and looking down at us. Yeah,
moonlight is so calming, right and reassuring. Yes, especially if
you're a vampire or a werewolf. I heard that the
moon actually has this crazy, violent, cataclysmic past. Yeah, that's right,

(00:33):
hanging up there in the sky acting all common nights.
It turns out it may have been party to one
of the greatest murder mysteries in the history of the
Solar system, a very impactful event, that's right. And I
love when there are things hanging out right there on
our faces that give us clues as to great drama
that took place in deep dark history. Hi. I'm Jorge.

(01:12):
I'm a cartoonist, and I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
And welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained the
universe in which we look around at anything in the
universe and try to explain it to you. On today's program,
that big white, shiny thing in the night sky, the
thing you referred to as the moon, not any moon,

(01:34):
Not a moon, The moon, the moon earth little sidekick.
That's right. And if you're a person who wonders and
thinks about the history of things, you like all of
humanity must have looked up in the night sky wondered
what are the stars? Where do they come from? But
the biggest thing, the fattest thing out there in the
night sky is the moon. And what a mystery that
must have presented to ancient man and woman. Right, what

(01:57):
is that giant disk and where did it come from?
That's right, And that's a question that science is still
trying to answer. We've gone to the moon, We've looked
at the moon with crazy telescopes, people have walked across
it and brought samples back. But we still don't know
the answer to the question how did the Earth get
its moon. That's a crazy idea to me that we

(02:18):
don't know where the moon came from, you know, like
we it could have just appeared out of door one day,
or aliens could have dropped it off. Oh that's an
option I haven't heard yet that like somebody opened a
wormhole in the moon just look popped, there's a moon
all of a sudden. That's an awesome idea. Yeah, how
does something that big just come about right, so perfectly

(02:38):
round and pretty smooth and bright. Yeah, but it turns
out the Earth's moon is not like the other moon's.
You know, one of these things is not like the
other things, and the moon is kind of weird, which
makes it hard to explain. Yeah, it's a weird moon.
It's the only one we have, and so for a
long time it's sort of defined the whole concept of moon. Right,

(02:58):
But now that we've seen other planet and we've seen
how many little moons they have, were like, jeez, our
moon is kind of weird. Does my moon make me
look fat? You know, because we've got a big, fat moon. Yeah.
So this is an interesting question, and we wondered how
many of you out there no or think they know
the answer to the question where did the moon come from?
So I walked around the campus of UC Irvine and

(03:19):
accosted random strangers who are willing to talk to me
and asked them this question, where do you think the
moon came from? Yeah, so before you listen to these answers,
think for yourself what would be your best guess. Here's
what people have to say. I'm not entirely certain. I
just know gravity plays a part in it. There was
like a meteorite that hit the Earth which broke off
some rocks or something like that. From what I remember,

(03:41):
it might be that, well this is like the big Thing,
but I don't really know, no, No, My best guess
is that it either came from some sort of material
that was already in the atmosphere and by some sort
of a potational pull was brought in. Alright, So not

(04:03):
a lot of strong ideas here. I think it's a
pretty there's a good breath of ideas. Yeah. I like
the people who answer where did the moon come from?
And they would just say gravity, Like that's the answer too,
pretty much everything there, or the or someone said the
Big Bang. I'm like, yeah, of course everything came from
the Big Bang. That is that is a good default

(04:26):
physics answer that somebody asked you a physics question. The
answer is always the Big Bang. How does the hig
boson give mass to other particles? It's the Big Bang? Really,
you can't go wrong. So could have see that person
on the street figured out how to always be right? Well,
let's talk about the moon. How big is the moon? Daniel?

(04:47):
Or let's maybe take a step back. What is the moon? Right,
So it's just a definitional thing, right. You have solar
systems that have these hierarchies. You almost always have the
main masses in the center. You have star where most
of this has gathered, and then you have the planets
orbiting around it. And then you know, you have need
a name for the stuff orbiting around the planets. The
theory this could go on forever. Right, you have the

(05:07):
star with planets around it, and then moons around the planets,
and then you can have things orbiting around the moon,
and then things orbiting around those things, like moons can
have moonies. Yeah, I think they're called moonlits moon or
moon ETOs or something. Yeah. So so it's just it's
just the name given to something floating around a planet. Yeah, exactly.

(05:29):
If you're a blob of stuff floating around the planet,
then we call you a moon. But it's interesting because
you've got to be big enough, right, Like, if you're
just specks of stuff, then we call you a ring. Right,
if you're like distributed all the way around the planet,
then we got then you've got rings, Like Saturn has rings.
Saturn's got rings Jupiter's got rings, you know. Um, and
it's in some ways a question of definition, Like there
is stuff floating around the Earth into sort of a vague,

(05:51):
hazy rings. So could you say the Earth has rings?
You know, people argue about that kind of stuff, but
that's just like that's arguing about the definition. It's not
really arguing about the science generally. But it has it
has to have a certain size to be called a moon,
I think, so, yeah, otherwise it's just a rock rock
rock or rock let or rocky rocky dough. Yeah, there

(06:12):
must be some organization out there that's tasked with classifying
what the moon and what's the moonlit, and what's just
a piece of ring and with just random garbage in space.
You know. Um, that doesn't sound a very glamorous job.
So how big is our moon? Our Our moon is
really big. Our moon is two thousand miles across, which
is pretty big compared to the Earth, which you know,

(06:32):
is only eight thousand miles across, and most of the
other planets their moons are tiny in comparison to the
size of the planet. So it's pretty big. So it's
like from California to about like Arkansas or something, you're
giving me the worries here, Like if you took the
Moon and sort of gently put it down, how far
would it would it look? Like? Why do you even
imagine that? Like placing the Moon on the Earth just

(06:54):
for scale, you know, like you were to walk across
the Moon, how long would it take you? You know? Right? Yeah, um,
well not that long because you could bounce because of
the gravity is pretty low. But yeah, it's like two
thousand miles, so it's not as far as l A
to New York, for example. But it's pretty big, right,
It's pretty big. And the interesting thing is that it's
at the same scale as other planets in the Solar System. Okay,

(07:15):
so I looked it up, uh, and I did some
quick calculations because I'm a train engineer and I can
do some math here, and so like if the Earth
was the size of a basketball, the Moon would be
a little bit under the size of a tennis ball.
I prefer I preferred fruit based analogy. So I'm gonna
go with a watermelon and an apple. Watermelon, and then

(07:35):
are you hungry, Daniel? Do we need to take a
break here and break for a while? A right, as
a watermelon and an apple. Except what this interesting? The
distance is maybe a lot larger than most people think. So,
like you would have to put a watermelon down and
then walked about twenty five ft and then set down
that apple. And that's about the distance between the Earth

(07:57):
and the Moon. Yeah, it's crazy. These things seem big,
but they're tiny compared to the distances between them, right,
which is sort of a larger lesson for everything in space, right,
Like the Sun and the Earth seem huge, but they're
really far apart compared to their diameters. And our solar
system is far from the next star and and it's
incredible the distances between stuff and space. Yeah, okay, so

(08:19):
that's the moon. Um. The crazy thing is that we
don't know where the moon came from. That's right. People
have been trying to figure out how do you get
the Moon this big and this weird around the planet
this close to the Sun, and they can't figure it out.
You know, they have simulations and theories, and you know,
this is what scientists do. They say, can we explain
what we see? And they start with an idea and

(08:39):
they see does that work? Right? Can I take that
idea and end up with the situation I see in
front of me, and they have some ideas, and we'll
talk about them, we'll dig into them. But the bottom
line is that none of the ideas we currently have
completely work. They all have problems, which suggests that the
answer is something we haven't yet thought of, or some
weird twist on one of the current ideas. All right,

(09:01):
bring it down for us. How what are the different
ways that a planet can get a moon? Like? If
I wanted a moon, what would I need to do?
You just go on Amazon, man, you can order anything. Well,
you can probably get a moon. Tomort. You want a moon,
I get you a moon by tomorrow afternoon. That's what
Walter from the Big Labowski would saying. Can I just
get a slightly a shorter person to just follow me
around and turn around me? That's not a moon, that

(09:23):
that's an assistant. You want somebody in your orbit, right
who protects you from stuff? Right, cleans out all the
space junk that's coming at you. Um. Yeah, So how
does the planet get a moon? Well? One option is
that it's formed when the planet is formed. Right, Let's
remember how our planets formed, and it's um not from
the Big Bang, right, Like our professional physicist from earlier. Directly,
it is from gravity though, So you're saying that the

(09:47):
planet can get a moon at the same time that
it's forming, kind of like a little twin brother. Yeah, exactly.
So imagine how is the planet formed. Well, it starts
from a big poof of gas and dust and rocks, right,
and then gravity coalesces it together gradually, slowly, slowly into
a big clump. And you might wonder, why doesn't it
all form into one big clump, right? Why do you
get little bits left over as moons or other stuff? Um?

(10:09):
And this sort of two answers to that, like most
of it goes into the big clump. Right. First of all,
like most of the stuff goes into the planet. Um.
The reason it doesn't all is that some of it's
traveling really fast, and so rather than getting pulled down
into the central clump, essentially ends up in orbit. Right.
So what we call in physics, we call it angular momentum.
Supported you know, it's the reason that the Earth doesn't
just fall into the Sun. Right, It's because it's moving fast. Oh.

(10:32):
I see, So there's a bunch of stuff that came together,
But some of that stuff was a little bit out
on the periphery and didn't quite make it into the
main planet clump exactly. And it's all spinning, right, the
whole thing is spinning and it's going and so it
starts out spinning around and it's moving too fast to
get sucked in. Um. And the other part of the
story is that none of this happens in isolation, right.

(10:53):
The Earth is not in the middle of totally empty
space forming quietly. This stuff going on all the time,
And in the early soul or system, we think things
were pretty crazy and so um. It might have been
that the early blob that formed the Earth could have
formed a single planet with no moon and no other
objects or whatever. But it probably got perturbed a lot,
you know, things crash into it, things bump into it.
Even just the tugging of the Sun and other planets

(11:15):
coming nearby keep that stuff from really settling, and so
some of it ends up still out in space opening
around the planet. Okay, it formed at the same time
as the planet. Yeah, that happens in some cases, we think, um,
so sorry it's too late for you there. Or if
you wanted a moon from the from zero, you've missed
your window. I need to go back to the to
the womb. That's right, the womb moon the moon. That's

(11:39):
a that's a tongue twist right there. Um yeah. But
the better way, I think, the more popular way the
planets gives moves. All the cool planet at least get
moons by basically interacting with other objects. You know, like, um,
something smashes into them, or something flies by and they
capture it. Um, that kind of stuff. Wait wait wait wait, um,
so those are two other things. You can either capture

(12:01):
a moon, Like if the Earth was flying around and
suddenly there was a little bit of rock out there,
it would it could like bring it into its orbit.
It could bring it into its orbit. That's not very
easy to do because much more likely is that something
comes and smashes into the Earth and then the resulting
debris floats up into space and then turns into a

(12:23):
system of rings and then coalesces into a moon. That's
much more likely. It's because it's hard to capture something entirely.
Either it deflects right, it bounces off into space, or
it hits the Earth getting captured. It means you have
to be exactly the right speed at exactly the right
angle at exactly the right orbit. It's a difficult thing
to do. It's like getting a perfect pool shot, you know,

(12:44):
jumping the eight ball or something. You're saying, that's harder
than getting hit by something out in space. Yeah, because
the Earth has gravity, right, So if something comes close by,
it's most likely just going to spiral in and smash
into the Earth, or it's going to bounce off into flect.
So coming in from somewhere else and then ending up
in orbit is pretty trick. Okay, So I think the
most likely way to get a moon is for something
to smash into the planet and the debris to float

(13:06):
up and then coalesce into a moon. Alright, let's get
into this smashing idea, but first let's take a quick break.

(13:27):
All right. So you're saying that one way to get
a moon, and maybe our moon came this way, is
that something smashed into the Earth and kind of like
broke off a piece that then became the moon. That's right, Yeah,
And that's a that's the way we think some of
the moon's have occurred in the Solar System. But it's
tricky to explain our moon, right, Um, and because our

(13:48):
moon is so big, right, Our moon is huge compared
to the planet, and so in order to make that
size the Moon work, you need a huge impact, right,
You need a ridiculously big effact. You can't just be
hit by laroc that knocks off a bunch of stuff.
You need a giant impact, like a planet killing impact. Yeah.
And the current models say that the kind of thing

(14:10):
that hit the Earth a long long time ago to
make the Moon might have been something the size of
a planet. It might have been a proto planet, might
have been something the size of Mars. Right, So we're
talking about like two planets colliding, right, This must have
been amazing to watch, right, right or not if you're
living in these planets, that's right. Well, we don't think
there was anything alive on Earth when it happened. The

(14:31):
best estimates say that this happened about um zero point
one billion years or a hundred million years after the
Earth was formed, So the Earth was still pretty hot
and a nasty when this kind of stuff happened. We
don't think there was any atmosphere of life yet collided
with another planet about its size. That's incredible, right, two

(14:52):
giant balls of rock just yeah, exactly, and um and
that must have been pretty kindaclasmic, right, A lot of
stuff must have gotten thrown off into space, and some
of that stuff coalesced into rings. So the Earth probably
had rings for a while, no way like Saturn. Yeah,
I know that has been pretty awesome, right, I kind
of wish the Earth had rings, Like what would that

(15:12):
look like at night or during the day, you know,
to see rings up in the sky. That would be
pretty incredible. So then the two planets collected is the
idea to planets collided, they form a new Earth with
some stuff out there in rings that eventually became the Moon.
That's right. And this collision was huge, right, It was
like a hundred million times the energy of the asteroid

(15:33):
that hit the Earth and probably killed the dinosaurs. So
it's a ginormous explosion. It's nothing that anybody could ever survive. Yeah,
I've seen I've seen the videos of the stimulations. Like
it's basically the Earth just gets pulverized and then just
kind of coagulates into this new thing. But it's like
it's basically obliterated. Yeah, and here you'll see the strength
of my fruit based analogy, which is imagined you take

(15:55):
two watermelons and you throw them together. What happens, right,
that's pretty much what's happened. You know, it's complete destruction.
The watermelons do not survive that kind of impact. So
then how do rings become moons? And why? Like, why
does Saturn still have rings and nut moons? Yeah, that's
a really awesome question because gravity, right, you would think

(16:17):
if stuff is floating out there in space, then eventually
gravity would coalesce, it would pull it all together into
a moon. And that does happen if you're far enough
away from the planet. If you're too close to the planet,
then the strength of gravity tugging on you from one
side and the strength of gravity tugging you from the
other side are too different. Because remember the force of
gravity depends on your distance from an object, and so

(16:39):
one side of the Moon is closer to the Earth
than the other side of the Moon, So the Earth
pulls on one side of the Moon more than the
other side, So it's literally pulling the Moon apart. But
the Moon is far enough away from the Earth that
the Earth is not strong enough to shred the Moon.
But if the Moon was a lot closer right then
it then it would be pulled apart. By these gravitational

(17:01):
they're called tidal forces. By the tidal forces, so there's
a region around every planet where you just cannot be
a moon because if you are, you're gonna get shredded, right,
So you just kind of get ripped apart. Yeah, it's
like a blender. There is like a blender. Yeah, and
we've seen this happen if you remember the comment that
hit Jupiter um in the nineties. It passed really close

(17:22):
by Jupiter before it hit and Jupiter pulled it apart
into twenty six pieces because of his tidal forces. And
so the larger the planet, the stronger the force of gravity,
and the more likely this is to happen. Oh I see.
So if Saturn had bigger rings or rings that were
further apart, then the tidal forces would be less and
then the little bits of it would have time when

(17:43):
and kind of space to clump together. Yeah, but that's
a whole other fascinating mystery, like how long has Saturn
hand rings? How long will it continue to have rings? Right?
We think that those rings are pretty stable because they
have been there for like a hundred million years and um,
and because Saturn has really strong title forces. So anything
that coalesces, Saturn will tear up again, but we don't

(18:05):
really know for sure. And Saturn does have some moons,
and we don't know like are those moons in the
process of being trashed, Like if you fast forwarded a
billion years with Saturn look totally different or is it
looked this way for a long time. It's amazing to
me how dynamic the Solar system is. You know, like
if you look at a picture of the Solar System
from two billion years ago, you might not recognize it.
You could have a different number of planets, and all

(18:25):
the planets could have different number of moons, or the
planets could even be in a different order. It's crazy
stuff that's happened in our Solar system. Or even two
billion years from now, it might look totally different. Yeah, well,
in two billion years from now, I hope we've built
massive interstellar structures so we're recognizable from space. Um. But
even without that, Yeah, the planets could reorganize or realign,
or things could drift this way or the other way,

(18:46):
or something could come from another Solar system and knock
knock into something and change everything. Yeah, you know, people
might imagine the Solar system is really static because it's old,
but we've only seen the recent history of it. And
one of the best ways to figure out what is
the history, what is the whole story here, what is
the drama that's taking place out there in space, is
to ask these questions, you know, like how did the

(19:06):
moon form? Yeah, so that's one possibility, is that something
smashed into the Earth through all this stuff out there
that became a moon because it was far enough away
from the Earth. But there's some that's not quite right, right,
Like that doesn't quite fit what we see or know
about the moon. Yeah, it's interesting because we can't quite
make that story explain everything we see. And so one

(19:29):
of the things we see, for example, is that we've
been to the moon and we've looked at rocks from
the moon. You've been to the moon. I mean we
collectively as humanity. I like to take credit for humanities
of humanities collective. The Royal week there. Okay, we have
won a bunch of NBA championships, by which I mean
me and Lebron James. Yeah, we are an acclaimed internet cartoonist.

(19:53):
But which I mean me and you. We are Tom Cruise.
You know, we are sexy in our fifties exactly. Humanity,
not me personally, has been to the Moon and brought
back rocks, and we've looked at those rocks, and those
rocks look really similar to rocks on Earth. And you
should know that rocks on every planet look different because
they're formed under different circumstances from different bits and different

(20:14):
temperatures and different ages. So you can sort of tell
where a rock came from, Like really that different because
they it all came from the debris of this Solar system, right,
wouldn't it all be sort of the same. But like
Mars is different from Earth, and we can we we
found rocks on Earth that we can tell came from
Mars because we know they're different. They have different structures,
formed in different temperatures at different times and this you know,

(20:37):
different totally different kind of tectonic activity on different planets,
like Mars doesn't have any at all, you know, and
letters of the bottoms that made in Mars Mars first, Yeah, exactly,
make Mars great again. They don't like, they don't want
to import our rocks anymore. The high tariffs on Earth
rocks anyway, So they can look at these rocks from

(20:59):
the Moon and they say, they looked just like rocks
from Earth. Right. So that's really interesting because suggests that
the stuff that the Moon is made out of is
really similar to the stuff that the Earth is made
out of. But if a really really big planet came
and smashed into the Earth, that's not what you would
really expect. You would expect that planet to have mostly
survived or that or to bounce off, or for this

(21:20):
stuff in the Moon to be made from that planet
that came. Right, You started out with two objects, you
have a collision, you end up with two objects. You
expect sort of a you know, a connection between the
incoming and the outgoing too, but instead both objects that
survives seem to be like the Earth stuff, which is
a bit weird. But we couldn't, um, couldn't this new
planet have also mixed in with our old Earth. And

(21:42):
so that's why it's the same, you know what I mean?
Like maybe the Moon and Earth is a mix of
these two pre crash planets. They have these simulations that
are totally crazy where essentially the other planet gets like
subsumed into the Earth like including it's it's like core, right,
So there's some other planets internal bits, right, the iron

(22:02):
and the nickel that makes up the inside of a
planet is inside the Earth. Now, like if you cut
the Earth open, you would find evidence for like, you know,
a second planet in there. And then what made the
Moon was like the Earth's crust just got ejected. It's
like ice cream, like a swirly ice cream doesn't completely
just mixed together, and that you would expect chunks. Yeah,

(22:23):
I'm glad you're with me on the food out analogies. Now,
trying to move us here towards dessert. We had our
fruit as the meal is wrapping up. In some places
fruit is considered dessert. I think we should do something
a little bit more meaty. Um. Yeah. So that's one
mystery is like why does the stuff on the Moon
look just like the stuff in the Earth. And they
can kind of make it work, right, Like they can

(22:43):
make it work that most of the stuff from the
Earth's crust turned into the Moon and the other planet
just sort of got swallowed by the Earth. But it's tricky.
It's not an easy thing to make work. And if
that happened, then you'd expect crazy stuff to have happened
on Earth, like you know, huge oceans of molten talk
of magma like magma oceans which is just a phrase

(23:03):
I love saying and hearing, magma oceans um. But we
don't see any evidence of that on Earth. Like people
who look at the history of rocks on Earth don't
see evidence of these of these magma ocetions that you
would expected from a huge such a huge collision. It
doesn't look like we were hit by a big rock. Yeah,
we don't see evidence for that on Earth. And you know,
when you put together this kind of story, you want
to check it multiple ways and does this make sense?

(23:24):
And let's see it in this other way? And we
can't find any confirmation for that currently, and the simulations
are are pretty hard to get right. Before we keep going,
let's take a short break. Man, that's wild. So we

(23:47):
really don't know where the moon came from. Kind of Yeah.
There are some other ideas, you know, crazy ideas about
how two other planets may have collided and basically totally
annihilated each other into some other sort of cosmic doughnut,
which then spun around and formed the Earth in the moon.
I said, that's right, we're doing double dessert here. One

(24:08):
of the crazy ideas is that the Earth essentially was
obliterated in this collision, and everything just became a big cloud,
really fast spinning cloud, which ended up shaping shaped into
this crazy donut shape. It's spun out a blob which
became the Moon. Um. That theory has some trouble because
it turns out the Moon doesn't really have like a
solid iron core like you would expect, like, you know,

(24:30):
the Earth has a as a release heavy metallic core
like most rocky planets, but the Moon is pretty light.
It's mostly fluffy, right. It has a little bit of
a core, but not very much. And so that's better
explained by saying that the Moon mostly came from Earth
crust stuff rather than from like an entire blob of
planetary stuff, where you would get like the same same

(24:51):
amount of serving of the core as you would have
the crust. Um. So all these theories have some problems. Well,
what are some other crazy ideas? Yeah, Well, a theory
that exists for a long time was just that the
Moon was captured, you know, like maybe the Moon came
from somewhere else or used to be its own planet,
or was wandering around just sort of got sucked into
the Earth's orbit. And this theory has a couple of problems.

(25:13):
One is that that's really hard to do. Like you
do simulations and you have another planet approach Earth, as
we were saying before, usually they you know, spin off
each other and then one gets flung out into space
or they end up colliding right to get it to
come into stable or with that last for billions of years.
That's really really hard to do. That's a one in
a billion chance. So that might be possible, but it's

(25:34):
hard to do. And the other problem is it doesn't
explain why the Earth and the Moon looks so similar, right,
they have like these really similar rocks on them. The
Moon came from somewhere else. I was captured. It shouldn't
have the same basically rock d n a that we have. Okay,
but I heard another idea is that maybe the Moon
fell off to Earth like it was part of us,
but then it was like I'll see you later. Yeah.

(25:56):
I think this is a really popular, super ancient idea,
Like if you look in the historical documents, people speculate
about this, you know, a thousand years ago before really
anybody knew physics, and somebody even wrote that the Pacific
Ocean was like the scar of the moon leaving the Earth.
You know that a huge chunk of land to just
like floated off into into space because the Earth of spinning, um,
and it got turned into the moon. The moon is Atlantis?

(26:21):
Is Atlantis? Oh my gosh. I love when you can
connect to mysteries at once. Um. But there's basically no
data to support that at all. I mean, it's just
I mean, we know the Pacific Ocean is not formed
by somebody taking a scoop out of the Earth, um.
And so it was just like random speculation. But it
was a popular idea for you know, a long time
among the medieval and ancient folks. So what's kind of

(26:47):
the best current thinking about where the moon came from?
I think, um, if you ask most scientists, and I
haven't asked most scientists, but I've asked a few. He
was asked science scientists. I've asked a scientist who's an
expert in planetary science, and I've asked myself. I'm a scientist. Um,
So yes, I've asked scientists about this. That's the deep

(27:10):
research we do for this show, folks. UM. And the
prevailing theory is the giant impact, right, it has some problems.
There are things we don't understand about it. But that's
sort of the progress of science. Right, we say, here's
a bunch of ideas. This one doesn't quite work, but
it mostly works. The elements of it that explain things
we see. There's just stuff to figure out. And so
that's that's the prevailing ideas, the giant impact. It's the

(27:32):
best idea we have. That's right, that it's that or
the Big bang? Man. Yeah, and I like this process
of science. You know, we have one idea, we refine it,
We refined it, and then we see doesn't fit the
data better than it used to. Is it sort of
coming together? It's like solving a murder mystery, right, You
look for clues, you come up with the theory. Something
doesn't quite work, makes you change your theory. Eventually you

(27:54):
have a story that explains everything you see and that
fits in with what other people say and that makes sense.
You get more data, and that's what we're looking for,
and we have a story. They definitely wasn't murder. A
huge planet died um in the making of our moon,
but we don't quite know how it happened. And it
might be that, you know, it's just sort of weird,
and it's it seems unlikely that this sort of configuration

(28:15):
would happen, and maybe it was unlikely, or maybe there's
some part of the story we haven't understood, like there
was two cataclysms, or you know, two planets hit the
Earth or something like that makes you wonder, what if
that other planet or asteroid hadn't hit us, you know,
if it just missed by a few degrees, we wouldn't
have a moon and we would have a super different
planet Earth, right, Yeah, and things could be very different.

(28:37):
You know. The reason we have tides is because we
have the Moon, and the moon stabilizes the Earth's orbit,
and we think that the collision that caused the moon
might have also caused the tilt of the Earth, which
means if we didn't have a moon, we might not
have tides, we might not have seasons, and that's a
pretty big change in what life on Earth is like, right,
And a lot of people think the tides were critical
to life because as the sea comes in and out,

(29:00):
it's sort of like a lot of slashing around, which
is what you need to mix up those basic organic
chemicals into something that might turn into life and so yeah,
we might have the Moon to thank for the fact
that we're even here to ask about it. It just
that a planet had to die. That's right to get
to But in the interest of all things good, so
that we could be here eating watermelons, somebody had to
sacrifice a big planet. So yeah, that's another one of

(29:25):
these crazy mysteries that are just staring at us in
the face every single night. And when you think about
the Solar System next time, remember it's not static, it's dynamic.
There is stuff happening, and there is a story. It's
playing out really slowly right geological cosmic time scales. But
if you took a time lapse video of the Solar system,
it would seem like a crazy dance party. Yeah, so

(29:46):
next time you are mooning the moon, pull up your
pants and show some respect, because that we owe the
Moon a big thank you. All right, thanks for listening
to everyone, See you next time. If you still have
a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop

(30:06):
us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You
can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel
and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com