Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.2518n&link_type=abstract
2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #25.18; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Rather than originating in a giant impact, the Moon may have begun as a co-formed object with Earth, of mass 1/54 that of Earth, including an iron core. That core was pitted from the proto-Moon by a Roche stripping process. It is necessary to assume that the outward spiralling of the proto-Moon due to tidal friction was arrested due to a change in Earth spin (probably due to impact of a third body) that created a situation like that of Phobos and Mars, such that the month was less than the sol. Inside the Roche limit, the proto-Moon shed its mantle into a disk of rock, which was driven out past the Roche limit by the tidal action of the remaining lunar core and mantle. When stripping reached the dense iron core, it went briefly into abeyance but the core still drove out the disk before it disintegrated into a ring. Out beyond the Roche limit for rock, the Moon quickly re-formed out of the rock disk. Its tidal interaction with the iron ring drove the latter onto the Earth, while much of the energy went into driving the Moon out to larger distance and larger eccentricity (Bethell, Wisdom and Zuber 2006), starting not long after the Moon re-formed. The Moon ends in orbit with the month longer than the sol, so it spirals out.
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