When will it disappear?

Scientists predict what will happen in the future as the Moon moves further and further away from Earth, which also causes our planet to slow down.

pig Live Science, the Moon’s orbit around the Earth seems so regular that some civilizations rely on its movement to calculate the date. However, modern science shows thatIt slowly leaves Earth, causing oceans around the world to swell..

Scientists have determined the speed at which the Moon is moving away from Earth thanks to the reflectors that NASA placed on this celestial body from the Apollo mission.

Earth seen from the Moon

“Earth seen from the Moon – (Photo: Jeremú Horner).

For more than 50 years, laser beams from Earth struck them and the recorded reflected pulses helped NASA estimate that the celestial body was moving away from Earth by about 3.8 cm per year.

This speed is only equal to the speed of human fingernails, but the cumulative distance over the extremely long lifetimes of astronomical objects creates a real problem.

Earth’s oceans bulge towards the Moon due to its gravitational pull on the tides. On the contrary, our “sister Hang” gradually has an oval-shaped face because it is also stretched by the gravitational interaction of the earth.

Astrophysicist Madelyn Broome from the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA) said that about 4.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was newly formed, the Earth’s rotation speed was significantly faster, only lasted about 5 hours.

The Moon was also much closer to Earth at the time, and the two celestial bodies were constantly interacting with each other. Gravity from Earth’s tidal bulge affects the Moon; Conversely, the oceans are moved by the force of the Moon, which also creates friction on the Earth’s surface, slowing it down.

Since the Earth and the Moon are both part of a gravitationally interacting system, the angular momentum of the entire system must be conserved. Momentum (also called torque) represents the energy contained in something rotating. The faster the rotation and the more the two objects rotate away from each other, the more energy there is and vice versa.

Therefore, when the Earth’s rotation slowed down – and in the past the Moon itself slowed down – the two bodies had to balance the angular momentum of the entire system by moving away from each other. other. The moon recognized itself as being in motion.

Today’s moon no longer slows down, because it officially stopped spinning on its own a long time ago and is ‘tidally locked’ to Earththat is, to point a single face towards our planet.

The models show that in the end the Earth chose to “hold on” to the Moon by also locking itself into the tides, facing the Moon with only one face so that the Moon would not have to move back.

This will happen in the next 50 billion years, according to Dr. Jean Creighton, Director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwɑukee and Professor Eric Klumpe from Middle Tennessee State University (USA).

But unfortunately, the parent star of the two – the Sun – will run out of energy and evolve into a red giant before collapsing into a white dwarf in about 5 billion years.

In the process of transforming into a red giant, the Sun is expected to engulf a number of nearby planets – including their satellites, of course.

Earth is on the “swallowed up” list, according to the calculations. This means that the Moon and the Earth will disappear much sooner before they both decide to stop rotating.

Article source: MTN