Was the Moon Bigger In the Past

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1. The Moon Was Actually Bigger in the Past

The Moon Was Actually Bigger in the Past

Yes that’s true, the moon was way closer to our earth at the time of formation around 4.5 billion years ago (calculated by radiometric dating of earth and moon samples). The moon also appeared a lot bigger in those times.

Let’s just look at how the moon came into existence.

Moon is said to be formed when a Mars sized object crashed into our earth, the debris scattered into space as a mixture of hot gases and molten rocks, covering around the earth as a disk and soon after when it started to collect by gravity of rocks, it started to shape into bigger and bigger, resulting our moon. This is widely accepted as giant-impact theory.

At the time when the moon formed, it was just 4 radii of earth, that is about 15,000 to 20,000 miles. And it looked about 15 to 20 times bigger than what it looks today.

Just think how big the moon would look like to the dinosaurs of the mesozoic era. They would have enjoyed the night scenery like a fairy tale. I think they were quite lucky in this regard.

Just see the difference in the distance between the moon and earth then and now. Currently, it is about 238,000 miles from us. The distance has increased by more than 10 times from then and it’s getting bigger every year by 1.5 inches.

After the formation of the moon in the early times, it gradually started to increase its distance from the earth, not because it hates earth but because of some gravitational disturbances by tidal forces, tidal acceleration, tidal locking.

Someone said it pretty nicely that, moon is getting farther away from the earth because the earth’s rotation on its axis is getting slower due to tidal forces of the moon on the earth. And the spin angular momentum has to go somewhere, which is helping the moon ascend into a higher orbit, far from us.

Although what we have discussed are some estimated numbers calculated by scientists in their simulations, they show to the close what truly was back then.