Could the Moon really crash into the Earth a la Moonfall?
It’s been a while since Roland Emmerich’s movie Moonfall released and its plot leaves people wondering if the moon could crash into Earth. As thoroughly explained by its title, the movie shows the big rock, the moon that is, which orbits the Earth suddenly falling out of the sky. While the movie raises inevitable questions, is there really any natural object in space that can actually push the Moon out of its orbit and crash into the Earth? Well, to find the answer to this question, we should first dive into other questions and know about how our natural satellite, the Moon, actually came into existence.
The Moon has been Earth’s close companion for billions of years. It is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years, about the same age as the Earth. The solid, rocky body surrounded by a very thin layer of gases known as the exosphere, has been a constant companion of our Earth. According to a widely accepted hypothesis of NASA, the Moon is speculated to have emerged from rocky debris thrown up into the sky following a massive crash between the Earth and a smaller object: a hypothetical object called Theia. Another hypothesis suggests that the Moon as well as the Earth formed after the collision of two bodies, five times the size of Mars.
The Moon orbits planet Earth about 385,000 kilometers away and it has an estimated mass of more than 81 million tons. It is about a quarter the size of Earth, OiCanadian revealed, quoting Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. from NASA at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Well, chances are negligible. The reason is that the Moon is much smaller than the Earth and therefore, its force of attraction is much less than the Earth.
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