The moon is a fixture in the night sky, but in reality, all is not as it seems.
It turns out that scientists have discovered that the Moon is moving away from Earth, and it’s changing everything we thought we knew about our planet’s relationship to its only natural satellite.
It also has a very real impact on the length of days on our planet – albeit at an incredibly slow rate.
As the Moon moves away from Earth over millions of years, it also lengthens the length of the average day.
AND studies by a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on rock from a 90-million-year-old formation. Thanks to this, they were able to analyze the interactions of the Earth with the Moon 1.4 billion years ago.
It turns out that the Moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of 3.82 centimeters per year. This means that it will eventually result in Earth days lasting 25 hours per 200 million years.
Stephen Meyers, who is a professor of geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “As the Moon recedes, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater that slows down as it stretches its arms.”
He added: “One of our ambitions was to use astrochronology to determine time in the most distant past, to create very old geological time scales.
“We want to be able to study billion-year-old rocks in a way that is comparable to how we study modern geological processes.”
It’s not the only story changing our understanding of the Moon recently.
Scientists have also just uncovered billions of years of secrets hidden beneath the moon’s surface—all thanks to China’s space program, which has revealed hidden structures that may help us begin to piece together the moon’s past.
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