Amazing facts about the moon, you don't know
New Delhi : The heavenly moon is not a stranger for us. We see it at night, almost daily, until the weather turns extremely cloudy. Besides connecting it with eclipses and some mythological beliefs there are many more facts about moon which are not known to all of us. To enhance your knowledge, we have come up with scientific facts about the lunar space which are worth-knowing.
The moon is about 30 Earths away from Earth. However, the moon doesn't orbit in a perfect circle. Therefore, its distance from Earth fluctuates. The average distance between the Earth and the moon is 238,855 miles
The moon's gravity exerts a pull on Earth, which is partially responsible for the ebb and flow of ocean tides. Physicist George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, discovered that the way the moon's gravity pulls Earth's water is gradually slowing the rotation of Earth. Our day gets longer by about 0.002 second each century, which adds up over billions and billions of years.
Each month's full moon has a different name. The full moon is January is called a "wolf moon". The moon in June is called strawberry moon, the moon in September is called harvest moon and the moon in December is called cold moon.
We get a super moon once in a year due to the moon's orbit. The moon's orbit isn't perfectly circular; rather, it's elliptical. So when the moon is at the closest point to the Earth in its cycle, it looks 14% larger and 30% brighter to us than when the moon is farthest away.
Scientists believe that the moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago. According to NASA, the moon is thought to have come about after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth.
Astronomers say that the moon has extremely thin atmosphere and there is lack of liquid water which makes the lunar space impossible for human settling.
The moon rotates on its axis, making a full turn every 27 Earth days. So daytime on one side of the moon lasts about 13 and a half Earth days, followed by an equal amount of night time. When the moon is drenched in sunlight, the temperature can reach 240 degrees Fahrenheit; when it's dark, the temperature can plummet to -290 degrees Fahrenheit.
The moon has moon quakes, similar to earthquakes. Data from the 1970s led to a discovery in 2006 that the moon is seismically active.
The Earth's moon is the fifth largest moon in the solar system. There are more than 150 moons orbiting the planets in the solar system. The largest moon is Ganymede, one of Jupiter's 79 moons.
There will be 228 lunar eclipses in the 21st century. There will be one total and one partial lunar eclipse in 2019, and four eclipses in 2020.
In January 2019, China landed on the far side of the moon and created history.
