Phobos: Doomed Moon of Mars This is Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, and it’s living on borrowed time. It is thought to be perhaps a captured asteroid, sucked in by Mars’ gravity, and its pock-marked surface is scarred with craters thanks to debris ejected from its home planet’s own collisions with meteors and the like over the years. But Phobos won’t be around forever. Unlike our own Moon, which orbits at a safe distance of several hundred thousand kilometers (and will one day be “tidally locked” to Earth), Phobos is less than 6,000 km from Mars. This causes extreme tidal forces, stretching Phobos like saltwater taffy made of solid rock. Eventually, perhaps a million years from now, it will crumble into a ring of debris, with that ring later decaying into an orbital rainstorm of rocky meteoric fireballs. That’s pretty cool. Mars will eat its own moon one day, in a spectacular show of orbital destruction, and I’m sorry we won’t be around to watch. (via APOD)
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Phobos: Doomed Moon of Mars

This is Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, and it’s living on borrowed time. It is thought to be perhaps a captured asteroid, sucked in by Mars’ gravity, and its pock-marked surface is scarred with craters thanks to debris ejected from its home planet’s own collisions with meteors and the like over the years.

But Phobos won’t be around forever. Unlike our own Moon, which orbits at a safe distance of several hundred thousand kilometers (and will one day be “tidally locked” to Earth), Phobos is less than 6,000 km from Mars. This causes extreme tidal forces, stretching Phobos like saltwater taffy made of solid rock. Eventually, perhaps a million years from now, it will crumble into a ring of debris, with that ring later decaying into an orbital rainstorm of rocky meteoric fireballs.

That’s pretty cool. Mars will eat its own moon one day, in a spectacular show of orbital destruction, and I’m sorry we won’t be around to watch.

(via APOD)

Source: apod.nasa.gov

After learning about the general strength and prevalence of lunar tides, students often asked me whether the Moon’s tidal forces can affect human behavior. Yes, provided you had a very, very big head. For example, if your brain were, say, 7,000 miles in diameter (the size of Earth), then the Moon’s tidal forces would indeed give you an oblong-shaped cranium and impart untold consequences on your mental faculties. For normal Homo sapiens, however, the Moon’s difference in gravity from one side of the head to the other is immeasurably small. The weight of an understuffed down pillow imparts a squeezing force that is over seven trillion times larger than the Moon’s tidal force on your head.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, on whether the Moon’s tidal forces can affect human behavior. An appropriate reminder in a week where Halloween and the full moon fall only days apart, which, thanks to this, we know means very little.

Source: haydenplanetarium.org

Scientists say moon may have crashed Titanic

A once in a lifetime alignment of the moon and sun may have enhanced North Atlantic tides so much that enormous icebergs were able to drift south into the Titanic’s path:

Greenland icebergs of the type that the Titanic struck generally become stuck in the shallow waters off Labrador and Newfoundland, and cannot resume moving southward until they have melted enough to re-float or a high tide frees them, Olson said.

So how was it that such a large number of icebergs had floated so far south that they were in the shipping lanes well south of Newfoundland that night?

The team investigated speculation by the late oceanographer Fergus Wood that an unusually close approach by the moon in January 1912 may have produced such high tides that far more icebergs than usual managed to separate from Greenland, and floated, still fully grown, into shipping lanes that had been moved south that spring because of reports of icebergs.

Also, apparently “forensic astronomy” is a thing?

And finally, some words from Buzz Aldrin: