Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Lunar far side

Good Question

I had never thought this one through in detail. I had assumed that the moon formed in orbit as described by Hartmann etc after the Moon-forming collision, and that as it formed it was already tide-locked to the Earth.

Note that tides scale as r^-3, so when the Moon originally formed at about 1/10 its current orbital distance, tides would have been 1000 times higher than they are now, and far more powerful at locking the Moon to the Earth.

(The solid-body tide in the Earth has a magnitude of ~20 cm today. When first-formed, the Moon would have raised tides in the rock of the Earth's surface of 200m amplitude! - and if the surface of the Eareth was molten as a result of the impact then magma tides of > 1 km would result. On the Moon, the effect is about 20 times larger than on the Earth, so a ~ 20 km tsunami of molten magma would be raised on the Moon!)

But I haven't actually run the simulations so I can't answer fully your question...

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