How fast moon moves

O'Donoghue said he only recently learned how to create scientific animations like this — his first were for a NASA news release about Saturn's vanishing rings. After that, he moved on to animating other difficult-to-grasp space concepts, like the torturously slow speed of light. Today, the moon is pulling away from Earth at about 3.

Scientists refer to this as "lunar retreat. But you can't see every rate of retreat in his video, he noted, because it quickly moves through millions of years. Much of the variation in the moon's pace of movement comes from lunar meteorite impacts and major geological changes on Earth. Such events have coincided with three notable spikes in the pace of lunar retreat. One spike came around the same time as some of the earliest evidence of ocean tides — about 3.

At that time, the moon started retreating at 6. Similarly, about million years ago, the moon's speed of retreat spiked to 7 centimeters per year as it got bombarded with meteors. It continued racing away at that rate as the supercontinent Rodinia broke apart on Earth. The third spike was roughly million years ago: As life was exploding on Earth following millions of years of fluctuation between ice ages and hothouse conditions, the moon retreated at 6.

This creates tidal friction that slows the moon's rotation. Over time, the rotation was slowed enough that the moon's orbit and rotation matched , and the same face became tidally locked, forever pointed toward Earth.

The moon is not the only satellite to suffer friction with its parent planet. Many other large moons in the solar system are tidally locked with their partner. Of the larger moons, only Saturn's moon Hyperion , which tumbles chaotically and interacts with other moons, is not tidally synchronized.

The lunar rotation determined whether the infamous Man in the Moon, a face-like pattern of dark maria on the Earth-facing side, wound up pointing toward our planet. Gravity created an Earth-side bulge in the moon, slowing down its rotation in the past to create the synchronous rotation and keeping the longer lunar axis toward our world. Recent research suggested that the side of the moon facing Earth was determined by how quickly the lunar rotation slowed.

Because the moon lost speed slowly, there was about a two-to-one chance that the Man in the Moon would wind up facing Earth rather than keeping a space-bound view. Instead, the real coincidence is that the moon's slowdown was just enough to load the coin. The situation is not limited to large planets. The dwarf planet Pluto is tidally locked to its moon Charon , which is almost as large as the former planet.

The time it takes for the Moon to rotate once on its axis is equal to the time it takes for the Moon to orbit once around Earth.

This keeps the same side of the Moon facing towards Earth throughout the month. If the Moon did not rotate on its axis at all, or if it rotated at any other rate, then we would see different parts of the Moon throughout the month. The Moon takes about one month to orbit Earth As the Moon completes each It takes a little more than two additional days for sunlight to hit the Moon in the same way it did on day zero.

This is why it takes Yes, everyone sees the same phases of the Moon. If you traveled to the other hemisphere, the Moon would be in the same phase as it is at home, but it would appear upside down compared to what you're used to! For example, on March 8, , the Moon was in a waning crescent phase. Seen from the Northern Hemisphere, the waning crescent appeared on the left side of the Moon. Seen from the Southern Hemisphere, the crescent appeared on the right. Data visualizations of the waning crescent moon as seen from the Northern Hemisphere left and the Southern Hemisphere right on March 8, In this hypothesis, two massive objects five times the size of Mars crashed into each other.

Earth and its moon then condensed out of the clouds of matter that resulted from the collision, NASA reported. However, it is Earth that sets the speed of the moon's rotation. The moon completes one revolution in about 27 days — nearly the same time it takes for the moon to orbit Earth: As a result, people on Earth only ever see one side of the moon. If a moon day were any longer or shorter, we would be able to see all of the moon's surface as the moon orbited Earth.

Related: Why does the moon have phases? In fact, the orbit and rotation aren't perfectly matched because the Earth actually travels in an oval-like elliptical orbit. When the moon is at the point of its orbit closest to Earth, its rotation is slower than its orbit, allowing us to see an additional 8 degrees of its surface that we usually would, according to Space. The illusion of the moon not rotating from our perspective is caused by tidal locking , or a synchronous rotation in which a locked body takes just as long to orbit around its partner as it does to revolve once on its axis due to its partner's gravity.

The moons of other planets experience the same effect.