Tuesday, 21 March 2017

Can the apparent equal size of sun and moon be explained or is this a coincidence?


Is there a possible explanation for the apparent equal size of sun and moon or is this a coincidence?


(An explanation can involve something like tide-lock effects or the anthropic principle.)



Answer



It just happens to be a coincidence.


The current popular theory for how the Moon formed was a glancing impact on the Earth, late in the planet buiding process, by a Mars sized object. This caused the break up of the impactor and debris from both the impactor and the proto-Earth was flung into orbit to later coallesce into the Moon. So the Moon's size just happens to be random.


Plus the Moon was formed closer to the Earth and due to tidal interactions is slowly drifting away. Over time (astronomical time, millions and millions of years) it will appear smaller and smaller in the sky. It will still always be roughly the size of the Sun but total solar eclipses will become rarer and rarer (they will be more and more annular or partial). Likewise in the past, it was larger and total eclipses were both longer and more common.


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