Will the Moon be able to collide with Earth like in the movie Moonfall?

It's been a while since Roland Emmerich's Moonfall movie was released and its plot makes people wonder if the moon could crash into Earth. According to the film's official IMDB entry, "a mysterious force knocked the moon out of its orbit", sending it plummeting to Earth. And to find out what this mysterious force is, we should first delve into other questions and learn about how our natural satellite came into being.

The Formation of the Moon

The Moon has been a close companion of the Earth for billions of years. According to a widely accepted theory by NASA, the moon is speculated to have emerged from rock debris thrown into space after a massive collision between Earth and the smaller, hypothetical planet. named Theia. Another theory is that the Moon as well as the Earth formed after the collision of two bodies 5 times the size of Mars.

Theia is the name of a hypothetical planet that, according to the great impact hypothesis of the formation of the moon, collided with Earth about 4 billion years ago. This collision with the angle of impact was just a slip-on but was enough to destroy Theia, its iron core buried in the primordial Earth. A large amount of material ejected and fell into orbit around the Earth, from which the moon was formed. The Earth also gained a significant amount of angular momentum from this collision, as well as increasing its total mass to its present level.

Distance of the Moon and Earth

The moon orbits our planet and it is about 385,000 km from Earth, the estimated mass of the moon is more than 81 million tons. It's about a quarter the size of the Earth, says Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Can the Moon crash into the Earth?

As we mentioned above, "a mysterious force knocked the moon out of its orbit", causing it to plunge to Earth. From a practical perspective, this mysterious force can be generated from collisions between the moon and asteroids and comets.

The chance of this happening is quite possible, but it is extremely small if we do not mean to care. The reason is because the moon is much smaller than the Earth, so its gravitational pull is also much smaller than that of the Earth. Earth's gravity will pull the asteroid, comet or any other object towards itself.

According to previous astronomical studies, most large moons usually never hit the planet they orbit. The reason has to do with how large moons are formed. Most of them started out as rings of debris orbiting the planet. If the orbit is too slow and decays, debris will fall on the planet over time. This is what is happening right now with the rings around Saturn. However, if the orbit of the belt was faster enough for all the debris to move away from the planet, the debris would clump together due to gravity and eventually form the moon. And when this happens, the forming moon will also orbit fast enough to cause it to slowly move away from the planet. And that's what's happening to our moon. It is slowly moving away from Earth at a speed of about 1,

NASA's CNEOS identifies and tracks near-Earth objects (NEOs), such as asteroids and comets, to track whether they pose a threat to the Earth, moon, or neighboring planets neighbors in our other universe or not. To date, CNEOS has tracked approximately 28,000 NEOs approaching Earth within 1.3 astronomical units (194.5 million km). And luckily, we don't have any collisions with any other planets, asteroids, and NEOs.

NASA says a NEO that could actually threaten Earth must be at least 140 meters in diameter. And an object that could actually collide and move the Moon out of orbit and fall toward Earth, according to NASA, would have to be "nearly as massive as the Moon itself." However, to date, according to NASA observations, no such large roaming asteroid has been recorded in the solar system - The largest known asteroid has a mass about 70 times less than the moon. and orbits about 180 million km from Earth.

The moon is not in fact a primordial object. According to NASA, the moon is "an evolved planet", with an interior partition similar to that of Earth, with a thick crust and a deep liquid portion. inside. After analyzing data on earthquakes on the moon, scientists discovered that part of its seismic activity stems from the contraction of the lunar crust under the effect of temperatures in the moon. cold heart. This has shrunk the moon by about 45 meters over the past few hundred million years.