Poptren.suara.com – Moon nearest Mars, Phobos, is heading for his apocalypse. In the not too distant future, on an astronomical time scale, Phobos will get closer and closer to Mars, before finally falling and colliding with the planet. Meanwhile, Deimos, another moon of Mars, will continue to drift away until it finally leaves Mars’ orbit.
Phobos approaches Mars at a rate of about 1.8 meters every hundred years; at those speeds, Phobos will either collide with Mars in 50 million years or break up into rings,” says NASA’s page about the Martian moon.
“Scientists already knew Phobos was doomed,” NASA said in a statement discussing the recent eclipses captured by Perseverance. “The moon is drawing ever closer to the Martian surface and is destined to collide with the planet in tens of millions of years. However, observations of eclipses from the Martian surface over the last two decades have also allowed scientists to refine their understanding of Phobos’ slow death spiral.”
Our own moon is moving away from us at a rate of about 3.78 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year, which means that in the future our descendants (if they still exist) will not see a total solar eclipse. The Moon would be too small from our perspective to cover the Sun.
“The fact that our Moon is currently completely eclipsed by the Sun is a happy coincidence. The Sun and Moon appear the same size in the sky because the Sun is about 400 times farther from Earth than the Moon, and about 400 times larger in diameter. 4 million years ago, before The Moon being pushed into its current orbit, the Moon will appear about three times as large in the sky as it is now.
source: iflscience.com
2023-07-27 15:30:00
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