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Old 09-07-2019, 10:01 AM   #1
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Default Re: Science scratches its' head

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nuclear View Post
And as far as this goes, its actually pretty cool how this works. If you take a look across the solar system, you'll find that with most moons on other planets this is also the case; that each moon only has one face to its planet at all times. This is because of a phenomenon known as Tidal Locking.

Essentially when a satellite at the scale of the moon orbits a planet as relatively close as the earth and moon, several interesting things happen. For one, the gravitational force difference between the far end of the moon and the far end is large enough to squeeze the moon into a sort of oval, its barely visible but its there. Imagine attaching a rope to the edge of a ball of play-do and swinging it around you, this is sort of how that would work. Its not a perfect analogy but it should get the point across.

What this change in shape does is change how the moon interacts with earths gravity. Imagine in this case attaching a rope to the "pointy end" of a football and swinging it around you. As you can imagine, no matter the position of the football when you start, it will always end up correcting itself and face a certain direction towards you. It may wobble and change orientation slightly (even the moon does this, depending on the time we may be able to see a bit of the rear face) but will always remain relatively stable. This has been observed in most cases of a moon orbiting a larger planet. Hope that helps!
The earth is a satellite around the sun, and it's not a perfect sphere either.

So ... I'm thinking the earth should have a hemisphere facing the sun -- global warming -- and a hemisphere facing away from the sun -- ice age.

Tidal Locking in action!
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