NASA Says the Moon Is Shrinking and Experiencing 'Moonquakes' (time.com) 67
The moon is getting smaller, which causes wrinkles in its surface and moonquakes, according to a new study sponsored by NASA. Time Magazine reports: As the moon's interior cools, it shrinks, which causes its hard surface to crack and form fault lines, according to research sponsored by NASA. The moon has gotten about 150 feet skinnier over the last few hundred million years. Astronauts have placed seismometers on the moon over a series of past missions. Scientists, who determined that the moonquakes are close enough to the fault lines to establish causality, published their analysis in a study in Nature Geoscience on Monday, according to NASA. The space agency has also recorded evidence of fault lines in a series of images. "Our analysis gives the first evidence that these faults are still active and likely producing moonquakes today as the Moon continues to gradually cool and shrink," said Thomas Watters, lead author of the study. Watters says that the quakes can register around a five on the Richter scale.
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Blow up Uranus all you like, as long as you don't insist in twerking. That would be gross.
Can a sphere be "skinnier" ? (Score:2)
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Dude, if your balls glow, you might want to see a specialist. And ponder what daughters you hung out with.
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In that case, wash hands before wanking is a good health tip.
Stop the shaming (Score:2)
The moon is getting smaller,Â
The moon emphatically stated, "it's really cold here you know."
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The moon emphatically stated, "it's really cold here you know."
. . . and down here on Earth, things are getting too warm.
Maybe we could hatch a screwball scheme to run up a nano tube to the Moon, and pump up our excess CO2 there. It might warm things up.
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I was in the pool!
It's not getting smaller ... (Score:1)
And you all thought (Score:2)
As Peter Capaldi knows: (Score:1)
The Moon's an egg!
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So they are using data 47 years old and only covering 3 years? why post these?
Because the sad truth of science funding is that more data is collected than what can be budgeted for scientific analysis. So it sits in a box, or magnetic tape until one day there is funding to analyze data collected 47 years ago.
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with data collected 47 years ago. Science makes evolutionary advances to the point that scientists realize either the conclusions are wrong, or that something unknown back then wasn't considered when making the analysis. So they pay a scientis
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Not really - you need some sort of geologic (lunalogic?) activity, but tectonic activity (thin plates of solid rock grinding together as they float across the semi-liquid mantle) is only one source of that. Though if you have tectonic plates they're likely to be the dominant expression, since most of the geological stresses can be relieved through plate motion. Even on Earth though we do have other sources - hot-spots where "updrafts" of hot magma collide with the middle of a plate (such as Hawai'i), or t
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Not quite - the quakes aren't causing the moon to compact, they're the result of it. Remember, planets are mostly liquid, the crust is just a thin eggshell of solid material coating the outside, chilled by radiating heat into the frigid vacuum of space.
The reason the moon (and every other planet is shrinking) is heat loss. They formed as balls of swirling gasses moving at orbital speeds that then condensed into balls of hot liquid, superheated by the collision of all those orbital-speed gas molecules, and
Hollow Moon Theory Confirmed! (Score:1)
So, if it is getting smaller. is it losing weight? (Score:2)
The real question: (Score:2)
How do we pin this on human activity so we can justify new international laws, dissolve freedom and sovereignty all while dishing out a massive guilt-trip on the public at large?
Fracking the Moon! (Score:2)
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How do we pin this on human activity
Singularity from the LHC, obvs.
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Because it will be hatching soon ... (Score:2)
... now that gestation is almost over. For those who don't know, what we call the Moon was laid a about a billion years ago near a source of food by a longer lived cosmic entity.