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#moons

4 posts3 participants0 posts today
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🇨🇦 Michael Porter 🇨🇦

Question for planetary astonomers:
What are the interesting effects of having a big moon (as we do), or being in a binary system like Pluto/Charon?

I remember that Larry Niven used the presence of a moon, and the tides produced, to some effect in his SF stories (written back in the 60s/70s, so some were made obsolete by later science).

Some ideas come to mind, with the caveat that a lot of stuff probably depends on the particulars of the formation of the planet in question (e.g. how much spin, and in what direction, did it end up with after accretion was mostly done?)

Tides: Would having a moon like ours slow cooling of the planet, due to flexing, à la Io?

In a system like Trappist-1, there's a strong possibility that the planets could be tidally locked to their star, but could having a moon help prevent that, with its own tidal forces?

This might be a question for biologists, but I'm thinking moonlight must have an effect on plants and animals?

Could a sufficiently-sized moon have any kind of protective effect, or on the flip side, a negative effefct on the planet? I know that even our own Moon takes up a tiny portion of the sky, so it's not like it's getting in the way of incoming asteroids to any great effect...

This was all sparked by the recent "Saturn has a buncha moons!!!” headlines, and my memories of teaching that the *number* of moons wasn't the thing I wanted my students to learn, but the *significance* of them. (e.g. Yes, Saturn has a lot of moons, but let's talk about Titan, or Enceladus)

#Astronomy#Biology#Moons
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KilleansRow 🇺🇲 🇺🇦🍀

2/2…isn’t alone of course so there are all the other #Planets and their #Moons keeping time with the #Sun at their respective distances. Altogether there is rich complexity and it would all make us quite dizzy if we could feel those. Generally though all of that is swamped by local traffic and we further contend with modernity that can turn night into day and fling us across time zones with ease. We have evolved not to get #Vertigo from all this. Still, watch out for the pukers…
🤣☕️🤘

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