WHENCE THE MOON?

A number of theories have been suggested over the years to explain the origin of the Moon, which is unique as a planetary satellite in that it has the greatest mass as a fraction of its primary, with the result that its orbital angular momentum exceeds the rotational momentum of the planet.

Whence the Moon? 31

In 1796 the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, inspired by the rings of Saturn, proposed that the solar system formed by the gravitational collapse of an enormous cloud of gas which was in a state of rotation. The conservation of angular momentum would have required the rate of rotation to increase, causing material to be shed every so often and making a series of concentric rings in a single plane. The central mass eventually formed the Sun, which was sufficiently hot to become self­luminous. As each ring of material condensed to become a planet, the process would have shed local rings which in turn formed satellites – in Earth’s case, the Moon. In Laplace’s time, the solar system appeared to comprise the entire celestial realm apart from the stars, and therefore his nebular hypothesis was the first serious attempt at cosmogony. Although accepted for many years, mathematical analysis later showed that it would not work as Laplace had imagined.

In 1878 George H. Darwin posited that the Earth and Moon formed together. The rapidly rotating body of hot liquid became an ellipsoid, rotating about its minor axis in an unstable equilibrium with two forces acting upon it: its own natural period of vibration, and tides raised by the Sun’s gravity. Once the forces achieved resonance, the shape became progressively more like a dumbbell until one day the narrow ‘neck’ collapsed, leaving two masses, the larger becoming Earth and the smaller the Moon. This fission hypothesis was popular for some time, but was later discarded owing to mathematical deficiencies, not least because a rapidly spinning ball of fluid would tend to divide into two more or less comparable masses, whereas the Moon has only 1/81st the mass of Earth.

In The Planets: Their Origin and Development, which was based on lectures he gave at Yale University and published in 1952, Harold Urey discussed the Moon in relation to the solar system as a whole. He argued that the Moon condensed from the solar nebula independently, and was later captured by Earth. Furthermore, he said it had never undergone thermal differentiation and that, consequently, its surface had no volcanic structures. This was dubbed the ‘cold Moon’ hypothesis.

In 1954 Gerard Kuiper proposed that the Earth and Moon formed simulta­neously in a common envelope within the solar nebula, and soon became gravitationally bound. He said the preponderance of craters was due to the Moon sweeping up all the debris in the neighbourhood. As the Moon’s mass is relatively large as a ratio of its primary, this made the Earth and its Moon essentially a ‘double planet’.

Nevertheless, as the space age dawned the origin of the Moon and the state of its interior were contested.