Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought

[Gerald]

About one in 10 rocky planets around stars like our Sun may host a moon proportionally as large as Earth's, researchers say.

Our Moon is disproportionately large - more than a quarter of Earth's diameter - a situation once thought to be rare.

Using computer simulations of planet formation, researchers have now shown that the grand impacts that resulted in our Moon may in fact be common.

The result may also help identify other planets that are hospitable to life.

A report outlining the results will be published in Icarus.

Last year, researchers from the University of Zurich's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and Ryuja Morishima of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in the US undertook a series of simulations to look at the way planets form from gas and smaller chunks of rock called planetesimals.

Our own moon is widely thought to have formed early in the Earth's history when a Mars-sized planet slammed into the Earth, resulting in a disc of molten material encircling the Earth which in time coalesced into the Moon as we know it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153


Note: 5 June 2011 Last updated at 00:53 GMT

[MH]

[Gerald]

Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought

Which one of earths moons could be more common?

[GoldenRivet]

I grow tired of stories like these.

stories about life on other planets, planets that support life, and planets similar to our own, or planets with liquid water all too often contain words like:

"May"

"Could possibly"

"theoretically"

"might be"

and besides that, these places are always 270 million light years away, nobody will be going there any time soon, so why in the hell should we care??????

I wouldnt have had this opinion last year, but ... NASA.... money better spent elsewhere if you ask me, shut them down and divert their funding to cancer research

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

I grow tired of stories like these.

stories about life on other planets, planets that support life, and planets similar to our own, or planets with liquid water all too often contain words like:

"May"

"Could possibly"

"theoretically"

"might be"

and besides that, these places are always 270 million light years away, nobody will be going there any time soon, so why in the hell should we care??????

I wouldnt have had this opinion last year, but ... NASA.... money better spent elsewhere if you ask me, shut them down and divert their funding to cancer research

Actually, stories like those rarely originate with NASA. They're usually provided by astronomers, universities and other scientific institutes. The Laboratoire de Métrologie Dynamique in Paris being the most famous for putting forth these claims lately.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

and besides that, these places are always 270 million light years away, nobody will be going there any time soon, so why in the hell should we care??????

Gliese 581
M3V type Red Dwarf star
(Note: Red Dwarfs will continue to burn for 10s of billions of years after our G2 type sun dies out)
Planets Gliese 581C, G, and E all maybe in the Star's habitable Zone.
Distance from Earth 20.3 light years

Tomorrow if we set aside .1% of the US GNP we could built a spacecraft capable of transporting 50,000 tons of payload to that system in a little over 200 years.

We can go there! We may have to go there because eventually Earth and our star system will get used up.