Good-bye Moon???????

Question

I heard or read, from something I believed to be legitimate, that the moon is rotating two inches further from our planet every year...

And ever since, I've been terrified to leave the house. Help!

Answer 1

Wow, I've marked this as interesting; I've never heard anything about this, but....yeah.  

I'm not even sure really what your ? was, but...you will prolly not be alive by the time the moon is no longer visible, at least not in the body you're in today.  h**l, we might move to the moon or another planet by that time, or some star may rotate closer to us...

(Besides, I have heard there is a good possiblity that there is a meteor that is supposed to hit us in six years, think Armageddon or Deep Impact, so you should leave your house and do what you can until THAT happens!!  THAT thought really scares me, cause it's six years.....)

Answer 2

if you have an object in orbit and you give it just a wee push in the direction of motion, the added energy will raise the orbit a bit.

every time the Moon creates a tide on the Earth, it causes a bulge of water, but the Earth spins faster than the Moon rotates, so the bulge moves with the surface slightly.  This means the mass of the bulge is uneven, with slightly more of it in the direction of the rotation of the Earth... this extra bit imparts a small force on the Moon, adding some energy and raising its orbit.

Don't worry... once the Moon gets high enough to no longer influence the tides, it will stop moving away.

Answer 3

It has happened to other planets and thats why they have rings. But dont worry 2 inches is nothing

Answer 4

Ive read about this as well.  The theory is that the moon resulted from the same "incident" as earth and is just continuing to drift into space.  Its been happening since the beginning of time so not to worry.  You can leave your house now.  

Answer 5

The moon is moving away from Earth at a relatively slow pace, slow enough to where in 50 million years there won't be too much of a difference. For Neptune however, Triton is moving closer until they are predicted to collide in more than 2 billion years. Triton will likely be destroyed before impact by gravity forces from Neptune.

Answer 6

"...the moon is rotating two inches further from our planet every year..."

Currently the moon is receding from Earth by 1.5 inches every year.

"...But do the anual two-inches change our tides? Our weather? Is it significant enough?..."

As the moon moves away from Earth our tides are affected, but not to any significant extent. Remember, our tides are also a result of the sun's gravity too.

"...When will the moon be far enough that Earth's gravitational pull can't hold it anymore?..."

No, the moon will never move so far away that it will escape Earth's gravity. On the contrary, once the moon is about 1.5-million kilometers from Earth it will stop receding. By then, however, our sun will have entered its red giant stage (about 3.5-billion years from now) and all life on Earth will be destroyed.

Answer 7

Not only is the Moon moving away from the Earth, but it's slowing down the rotation of the Earth as well, but don't panic!



The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm (a little less that 2 inches) a year. At that rate, it will that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years before you would even notice the Moon getting smaller in the sky. Also, due to tidal forces, as the Moon moves away it slows the Earth's rotation down by about 2 milliseconds a century. Once again, something you will never notice.

Relax, go outside and enjoy the stars.

Answer 8

Yes, well this is because....  wait..... huh? Your afraid to leave the house? The moon isn't coming 2 inches towards the Earth. It is moving 2 centimeters away from the Earth every year. It will be millions of years before the moon's position really changes, so you have nothing to worry about.

Answer 9

well.. the moon is moving away.. but thats no reason for u 2 stay home!! it has side effects... i mean it WILL have side effects LATER.. maybe 10000 yrs later!! have no FEAR!!  

Answer 10

At a constant rate of two inches per year, it would take the Moon no less than eight billion years to double its current distance from the Earth. Now, as far as I know, the rate at which it moves away will increase slowly with the distance, but the fact is we still have at least a few billion years to go before it escapes completely (consider that it's been orbiting the Earth for the past four billion years already and hasn't escaped), so you don't really have anything to worry about in this regard. There are plenty of far more immediate concerns to apply your mind to.

>But do the anual two-inches change our tides? Our weather? Is it significant enough?

No. It would take millions of years for the tides to change enough to have any practical effects. And the greenhouse gases our cars are pumping into the atmosphere will have a much larger effect on our weather than the Moon's increasing distance from the Earth.

>When will the moon be far enough that Earth's gravitational pull can't hold it anymore?

Billions of years from now.

>Will it fly off into the universe cause Earth to loes it's axis and do the same? Would we all fall off as it spins?

No. The Earth would actually be spinning more slowly by the time that happens. At any rate, the Earth's axis would remain aligned more or less how it is right now, and its spin would have to be far, far faster than it currently is in order to send the top layers flying off from the equator, and there is no known natural source of energy that would make it do this.

Keep in mind that all these predictions are based on the assumption that the Earth and the Moon are allowed to continue their natural motions. It is more likely that we humans will soon develop technology sufficient to change these actions, for example to take both the Earth and the Moon apart piece by piece and build a huge ring of computational nanoscale materials all around the Sun.

Answer 11

i think you have read this on a yahoo headliner on solar eclipses.

its drifting 2 inches a year approximately that's true

BUT

what does 2 inches a year do to us? the gravitational pull of the moon is not that strong to affect much with a 2 inch drift. The moon causes tides on earth but the drifting does affect much in a small period of time 1 millenium will move the moon away 2000in approximately by 5km and this is not much of a worry because life would probably be extinct on earth before the year 3000 due to the world system right now