Curiosities of Our Space: Two Faces One Reality... ✔

caracasfrases (55)in #steemstem • 6 years ago

Why is it that we always see the same face of the Moon? Why can not we see the other side?

Let's try to clear those doubts in this post.

¡Let's go there!

From our planet, we can see only 59% of the total lunar surface, when it is in full phase and reflecting 100% sunlight.

And the truth is that we always see the same face, that is, always with their same lunar spots and sometimes it can give the feeling that our moon does not rotate, but in actually it does.

The International Space Station and the Moon Source

However the remaining 41%, that is, its other side, we can not see it and all this is due to a phenomenon called: ** Synchronous rotation **.

And what is that?

Synchronous rotation occurs when the rotation movement (which takes a body to rotate on its axis) and its translation movement (what it takes for a body to complete an orbit around the body) other), coincide are completed in the same period of time.

Our Moon takes 28 days to rotate on its own axis and it takes the same time to complete an orbit around the Earth.

Earth and the Moon Source

That is the reason why we are always going to see the same face of the moon from Earth, since as it rotates on its own axis, it completes its orbit on our planet, always showing us the same face.

To see it in a more graphic way, here I share this video, in which they explain the movement of the moon around our planet:

Explanation of the video

There we will see our planet and the Moon (the red part is the face we can see).

The first example they give is if the Moon does not turn on its own axis, but it will orbit the Earth. If that happened, we see that at some point we could see his "hidden face." 0: 05 - 0: 25
The second example, tries to explain what would happen if the Moon turned very fast on its own axis and orbited the Earth. In this case we see how the Moon turns very fast on itself and we would often notice its "hidden face" 0: 30 - 0: 50

Both examples are hypothetical and are not fulfilled in reality.

Synchronous rotation: in this last example we see how it is a synchronous rotation. We can see how the Moon rotates on its own axis, at the same time as it completes the orbit to the planet. 0: 58 - 1: 15

But ... what does the hidden face of the Moon look like?

like this :)

Source

Fairly more mistreated by the asteroids, since it is towards the outside. As we can see, on more than one occasion, our beloved Luna has served us as a protective shield.

Of course, if we take into account the immensity of the universe, this shield is very small but ... any help will always be welcome.

In the end friends, this is how the face of the Moon looks that we can not see from Earth.