Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How Did The Moon Form?

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

How did the Earth get such a weird, big fluffy moon? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Or a werewolf. I heard that the moon actually has this crazy, violent, cataclysmic past. Yeah, that's right. Hanging up there in the sky, acting all calm and nice. It turns out it may have been partied 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. I'm a cartoonist. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain 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 refer to as the moon not any moon not a moon the moon earth little psychic that's right and if you're

our 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 is that giant disc? And importantly, 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 to 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 don't know where the moon came from, you know? Like,

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 somebody opened a wormhole and the moon just 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 round and pretty smooth and bright. Yeah, but it turns out the Earth's moon is not like the other moons. 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. 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? But now that we've seen other planets and we've seen

how many little moons they have, we're like, geez, our moon is kind of weird. Does my moon make me look fat? You know, because we got a big, fat moon. Yeah, so this is an interesting question, and we wondered how many of you out there know 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 accosted random strangers who are willing to talk to me and ask 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. It 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. It might be that. Well, they said like the big bang, but I don't really know. No? No. No. Okay.

My best guess is that it either came from some sort of material that was already in the atmosphere and by some sort of gravitational pull was brought in. All right, so not a lot of strong ideas here. I think there's a pretty, there's a good breadth of ideas. Yeah. I like the people who answer, what did the moon come from? And they would just say, gravity. Like, that's the answer to pretty much everything.

there. Or someone said the Big Bang. I'm like, yeah, of course, everything came from the Big Bang. That is a good default physics answer. Somebody asked you a physics question, the answer is always the Big Bang. How does the Hibboson give mass to other particles? It's the Big Bang.

The Big Bang. Really, you can't go wrong. So, kudos to that person on the street. Figure out how to always be right. Well, let's talk about the moon. How big is the moon, Daniel? Or let's maybe take a step back. What is a 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 a star where most of it has gathered. And then you have the planets orbiting around it. And then, you know, you need a name for the stuff orbiting around the planets. And in theory, this could go on forever, right? You have the star with planets around it and then moons around the planets. And then you could have things orbiting around the moon and then things orbiting around those things.

Like moons can have moonies. Yeah, I think they're called moonlitz, or moonitos or something. Monitos. Yeah, so it's just the name given to something floating around a planet. Yeah, exactly. If you're a blob of stuff floating around a 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 you got rings. Like Saturn has rings. Saturn's got rings. Saturn's got rings, you know. and it's in some ways a question of definition like there is stuff floating around the earth and it's sort of a vague hazy ring so could you say the earth has rings

people argue by 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 to have a certain size to be called a moon I think so yeah otherwise it's just a rock a rock or rocklet

or a rockito there must be some organization out there that's tasked with classifying what's a moon and what's a moon lit and what's just a piece of ring and what's just random garbage in space, you know. That doesn't sound like a very glamorous job. So how big is our moon? Our moon is really big. Our moon is 2,000 miles across, which is pretty big compared to the Earth, which you know

is only 8,000 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 on Earth, how far would it look like? Why do you even imagine that, like placing the moon on the Earth? Yeah, it's a crazy.

You know, like if you were to walk across the moon, how long would it take you, you know? Right. Yeah. Well, not that long because you could bounce because of the gravity is pretty low. But, yeah, it's like 2,000 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, right?

Okay, so I looked it up and I did some quick calculations because I'm a train engineer and I can do some math here. 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 prefer it a fruit-based analogy. So I'm going to go with a watermelon and an apple. Watermelon and are you hungry, Daniel? Do we need to take a break here and break for a lunch? All right, so watermelon and an apple, except what is this interesting, the distance, is maybe larger than most people think.

So, like, you would have to put a watermelon down and then walk about 25 feet and then set down that apple. And that's about the distance between the Earth 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 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 a moon this big and this weird um 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 they see does that work, right? Can I take that idea and end up with a 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. Wow. All right, break it down for us. 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 tomorrow you want a moon i get you a moon by tomorrow afternoon that's what walter from the big lubowski would say can i just get a slightly a shorter person to just follow me around and turn around me that's not a moon that 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 yeah um yeah so how does a 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 Big Bang, like our professional physicist from earlier said. Directly. It is from gravity though. So you're saying that a 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 a 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? And there's 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. 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? It's 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, I see. So there's a bunch of stuff that came together, but some of that stuff was a little bit out in the periphery and didn't quite like make it into the main. planet club. 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. And the other part of the story is that none of this happens in isolation, right? The Earth is not in the middle of totally empty space forming quietly. There's stuff going on all the time. And in the early

solar system, we think things were pretty crazy. And so 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 coming nearby, keep that stuff from really settling. And so some of it ends up still out in space orbiting around the planet. Okay. It formed at the same time as the planet. Yeah, that happens in some cases, we think. Okay.

So, sorry, it's too late for you there, Jorge. If you wanted a moon from zero, you've missed your window there. I need to go back to the womb. That's right. The womb, moon, moon. The moon moon. That's a tongue twister right there. Yeah, but the better way, I think, the more popular way, the planets get moons, all the cool planets at least get moons by basically interacting with other objects.

You know, like something smashes into them or something flies by and they capture it, that kind of stuff. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So those are two other things. So you can either capture a moon, like if the Earth was flying around and suddenly there was a little bit of rock out there, it could like, 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 system of rings and then coalesces into a moon. That's much more likely. Because it's hard to capture something entirely. Either it deflects, right?

It bounces off into space or it hits the Earth. Getting captured means you have to be exactly the right speed. 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, jumping the eight ball or something.

You were saying that's harder than getting hit by something out in space? Yeah, because Earth has gravity, right? So if something comes close by, it's most likely just going to spiral in and smash into the Earth. Okay. Or it's going to bounce off and deflect. So coming in from somewhere else and then ending up in orbit is pretty tricky. 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 up and then coal. a lesson to a moon. Oh. All right, let's get into this smashing idea. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers.

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With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. appeased that then became the moon. That's right, yeah.

And that's a way we think some of the moons have occurred in the solar system. But it's tricky to explain our moon, right? And because our moon is so big, right? Our moon is huge compared to the planet. And so in order to make that size of moon work, you need a huge impact, right? You need a ridiculously big impact. You can't just be hit by a little rock 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 that hit the earth long long time ago to make the moon might have been something the size of a planet 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 were living in either of these planets that's right well we don't think there was anything alive on earth when it happened the best estimates say that this happened about 0.1 billion years or 100 million years

after the Earth was formed. So the Earth was still pretty hot and nasty when this kind of stuff happened. We don't think there was any atmosphere or life yet. Wow. So it collided with another planet about its size. That's incredible, right? Two giant balls of rock. Just Yeah, exactly. And that must have been pretty cataclysmic, right?

And 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 must have been pretty awesome, right? I kind of wish the earth had rings Like what would that 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 collide This is the idea. Two planets collided, they formed 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 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 the videos of the simulations. It's basically the earth just gets pulverized and then just kind of quagulates 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 imagine you take two watermelons and you throw them together. What happens, right?

That's pretty much what's happened. You know, it's complete destruction. Watermelons do not survive that kind of impact. So then how do rings become moons? And why does Saturn still have rings and not moons? Yeah, that's a really awesome question, because gravity, right? You would think if Stumpf 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 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 then it would be pulled apart by these gravitation and 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 going to get shredded. Right. So you just kind of get ripped apart. Yeah. It's like a blender. The Earth is like a blender, yeah. And we've seen this happen. If you remember the comet

that hit Jupiter in the 90s, it passed really close by Jupiter before it hit and Jupiter pulled it apart into 26 pieces because of its 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 and kind of space to clump together. Yeah, but that's a whole other fascinating mystery. Like, how long has Saturn had rings?

How long will it continue to have rings, right? We think that those rings are pretty stable because they've been there for like 100 million years and because Saturn has really strong tidal forces, so anything that coalesces, Saturn will tear up again. But we don't 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, would 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 looked 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 the planets could have a 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. But even without that, yeah, the planets could reorganize or realign or things could drift this way or the other way

or something could come from another solar system and 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 moon form? Yeah. So that's one possibility is that something smashed into the Earth, through all the 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? 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 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? And it's just, I mean, we collectively as humanity. I like to take credit for humanities of humanities scores. The collective, yeah, the royal we are here. Okay. We have won a bunch of NBA championships by which I mean me and LeBron James. Yeah.

No, we are an acclaimed internet cartoonist, by which I mean, me and you. We are Tom Cruise. We are, Tom Cruise. We are sexy in our 50s, exactly. Humanity, not me personally, has been to the moon and brought back rocks, and we've looked at those rocks. And those rocks will 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 temperatures and different ages. So you can sort of tell where a rock came from.

Like really that different? Because it all came from the debris of the solar system, right? Wouldn't it all be sort of the same? Yeah, but like Mars is different from Earth. And 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 in different times and this, you know,

totally different kind of tectonic activity on different planets. Like Mars doesn't have any at all, you know. Had little letters at the bottom that said, made in Mars. That's right. Mars first. Yeah, exactly. Make Mars great again. They don't want to import our rocks anymore.

They have high tariffs on Earth rocks. Anyway, so they can look at these rocks from the moon, and they say they look 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 to bounce off or for the 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 connection

between the incoming and the outgoing two, but instead, both objects that survives seem to be like the Earth stuff, which is a bit weird. But wait, couldn't this new planet have also mixed in with our old Earth, and 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-create. crash planets. They have these simulations that are totally crazy where essentially the other planet gets like subsumed into the earth like including its core

right so there's some other planet internal bits right the iron 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 It doesn't completely get mixed together and that you would expect chunks. Yeah, I'm glad you're with me in the food analogies now. I'm trying to move us here towards dessert. We had our fruit.

Now we can eat dessert. As the meal is wrapping up. In some places, fruit is considered dessert. I think we should do something a little bit more meaty. 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 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 rock of magma, like magma oceans, which is just a phrase I love saying and hearing magma oceans. 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 magma oceans that you would have expected from such a huge collision. It doesn't look like we were hit by 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? And let's see it this other way. And we can't find any confirmation for that currently. And the simulations are pretty hard to get right.

Before we keep going, let's take a short break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers, the pilot is having a little. an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this.

Pull that. Turn this. It's just... I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing.

We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real, wait, what? Oh, that's the run right.

I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting

your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Man, that's wild. So we 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 made have collided and basically totally annihilated each other into some other sort of cosmic donut, which then spun around and formed the Earth and the Moon. Wait, did you say donut? I said donut. That's right. We're doing double dessert here. One of the crazy ideas is that the Earth essentially was obliterated in this collision and everything just became a big cloud, a really fast spinning cloud, which ended up shaped into this crazy donut shape, which spun out a blob, which became the moon. That theory has some trouble because it turns out that the moon doesn't really have like a solid iron core like you would expect.

Like, you know, the Earth has a really 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 amount of serving of the core as you would of the crust so all these theories have some problems well what are some other crazy ideas yeah well a theory that existed 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 plant or it was wandering around, just sort of got sucked in to the Earth's orbit. And this theory has a couple of problems. 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 spin off each other and then one gets flung out into space.

Or they end up colliding, right? To get it to come into a stable orbit that lasts 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 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 and was captured. It shouldn't have the same basically rock DNA that we have.

Okay. But I heard another idea is that maybe the moon fell off the Earth. Like it was part of us, but then it was like, I'll see you later. Yeah, I think this is a really popular super ancient idea. Like if you look in 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 that a huge chunk of land

had just like floated off into space because the Earth was spinning and it got turned into the moon. The moon is Atlantis. The moon is Atlantis. Oh my gosh. I love when you can connect two mysteries at once. But there's basically no data to support that at all.

I mean, we know the Pacific Ocean is not formed by somebody taking a scoop out of the earth. and so it was just like random speculation but it was a popular idea for a long time among medieval and ancient folks so what's kind of the best current thinking about where the moon came from I think if you asked most scientists

and I haven't asked most scientists but I've asked a few you've asked a scientist I've asked a scientist who's an expert on planetary science and I've asked myself I'm a scientist So, yes, I've asked scientists about this.

That's the deep research we do for this show, folks. 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. There's elements of it that explain things we see.

There's just stuff to figure out. And so that's the prevailing idea, the giant impact. It's the best idea we have. That's right. It's that or the big bang, man. Or gravity. Graveny. Yeah, and I like this process of science. We have one idea, we refine it, we refine it, and then we see, does it 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 a theory, something doesn't quite work, makes you change your theory. Eventually, you have a story that explains everything you see, and that fits in with what other people say, and that makes sense as you get more data. And that's what we're looking for. We have a story. There definitely was a murder. A huge planet died. 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 seems unlikely that this sort of configuration would happen. And maybe it was unlikely. Or maybe there's some part of the story we haven't understood. Like there were 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. 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. Wow. 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, it's sort of like a lot of sloshing 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.

Just that a planet had to die. That's right. To get the moon and us. Yeah, 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 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's a story. It's playing out really slowly, right, geological cosmic timescales. But if you took a time-lapse video of the solar system, it would seem like a crazy dance party. Yeah.

So next time you are mooning the moon, pull up your pants and show some respect because we owe the moon a big thank you. All right, thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, Please drop 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 Danielandhorpe.com. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I take it all. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists.

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