I ranted about politics a lot yesterday. Let’s balance that with some science!<\/p>\n
(Say it with me: Science!<\/a>)<\/p>\n Did you know the Earth might once have had multiple moons<\/a>? The theory is that, when the Moon was created by the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, a bunch of other chunks got blasted off, like blood spatter from a GTA4 pedestrian. Some of those chunks could have ended up in the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, areas where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon are balanced. Some Lagrange points are stable — think of a marble inside a bowl. Small perturbations won’t knock the marble out of the bowl. The same goes for Earth chunks that might have ended up in some of the Lagrange points.<\/p>\n If that’s too abstract for you, here, have a Flash app that shows the Solar System<\/a>. You can see the planets and large asteroids orbiting the sun, and the moons that are orbiting various planets. For fun, take a look at Jupiter and its umpty-ump moons. It’s hypnotic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I ranted about politics a lot yesterday. Let’s balance that with some science! (Say it with me: Science!) Did you know the Earth might once have had multiple moons? The theory is that, when the Moon was created by the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, a bunch of other chunks got … Continue reading And Now For Something Sciency<\/span>