Abstract
People have speculated about the origin of the Moon for centuries. There are, however, only three major scientific theories that have been proposed. The first theory was that at some time in the distant past, the Earth had somehow spawned the Moon. Perhaps the Earth was not as round then as it is today, and that imbalance caused it to split in two. This is the “fission hypothesis”, first proposed by George Darwin (son of Charles Darwin) in 1878.1 George Darwin knew that the length of time of the Moon’s revolution around the Earth is slowly increasing. According to Kepler’s Third Law, this means that the Moon must be gradually moving farther away from the Earth. If that is the case, then there must have been a time in the distant past when the Moon was much closer to the Earth than it is now. Understanding this, G.H. Darwin proposed that the Moon must have once been a part of the Earth. Another early scientist, Osmond Fisher, suggested that perhaps the Pacific Ocean was the scar left from the separation of the two bodies.
Discussion of the origin of the Moon is largely derived from the following sources: (a) Stephen G. Brush (1986) Early history of Selenogony, in: Origin of the Moon, W.K Hartmann, R.J. Phillips, and G.J. Taylor, eds., Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston; (b) David Vaniman, John Dietrich, G.J. Taylor, and G. Heiken (1991) Exploration, Samples, and Recent Concepts of the Moon; and (c) Lunar Sourcebook: A User’s Guide to the Moon, G.H. Heiken, D.T. Vaniman, and B.M. French, eds., Cambridge Press and Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston.
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(2008). Lunar origins and physical features. In: The Moon. Springer Praxis Books. Praxis. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73982-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73982-3_1
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