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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
The Moon's a little oblong.
Did you know the moon is not spherical? It is a slightly flattened sphere, and how this came to be has been a puzzle scientists have been trying to answer for about 200 years. A lab at MIT has come up with a model that seems to answer this question.
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
It is because it is spinning. Same reason that the earth flattens a little bit as it rotates on that 28.5 degrees axis m-fer.
Who are you? Uh, the moon is not spherical, just as the earth is not spherical, because they are distorted by their own rotations. The rotation causes the portion of earth located on the equator to bulge out. It's a result of centripetal force.
Did you read the paper in Science? The distortion of the moon I'm talking about cannot be explained by the centripetal force you suggest. That is what I mean.
3 comments:
It is because it is spinning. Same reason that the earth flattens a little bit as it rotates on that 28.5 degrees axis m-fer.
Who are you? Uh, the moon is not spherical, just as the earth is not spherical, because they are distorted by their own rotations. The rotation causes the portion of earth located on the equator to bulge out. It's a result of centripetal force.
Did you read the paper in Science? The distortion of the moon I'm talking about cannot be explained by the centripetal force you suggest. That is what I mean.
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