moonlets tagged posts

Lunar formation in the multiple-impact scenario. Moon- to Mars-sized impactors strike the Earth and leave a disk of debris orbiting the planet. The debris forms “moonlets” and migrate farther away from the Earth due to a tidal interaction, but eventually settle at a distance known as the Hill radius. Here, the moonlets merge to eventually form the moon..

The Moon, and the question of how it was formed, has long been a source of fascination and wonder. Now, a team of Israeli researchers suggests that the Moon we see every night is not Earth’s first moon, but rather the last in a series of moons that orbited Earth in the past. The newly proposed theory by Prof. Hagai Perets, of Technion, and Weizmann Institute Profs...

Uranus is seen in this false-color view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope from August 2003. The brightness of the planet’s faint rings and dark moons has been enhanced for visibility. Image credit: NASA/Erich Karkoschka (Univ. Arizona)

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus 30 years ago, but researchers are still making discoveries from the data it gathered then. A new study led by University of Idaho researchers suggests there could be two tiny, previously undiscovered moonlets orbiting near two of the planet’s rings. Rob Chancia, a University of Idaho doctoral student, spotted key patterns in the rings while examining decades-old images of Uranus’ icy rings taken by Voyager 2 in 1986...