How did the Moon end up with an orbit the perfect distance to cause total eclipses?
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Followup question. How would our understand g of science be different if this coincidence hadn’t happened? For example, gravitational lensing was observed during an eclipse. Tintin escape the Incas by “predicting” an eclipse. What else would be different?
The moon used to occlude the Sun even more in the past due to its closer orbit around Earth, and as the orbit grows, the moon will become incapable of occluding the Sun completely during a total eclipse unless the Sun grows dramatically faster to compensate…
Smaller objects fallen to earth and larger objects drifted away, leaving the only option, reality as we know it.
It’s a coincidence, but the moon used to be larger in the sky, and is continuing to get smaller. We just happen to live at a time when they are very roughly similar in size from our perspective.
The reason the Sun and Moon appear the same size in our sky is because the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but it is 400 times farther away.
It didn’t always, and it won’t always. Its orbit is slowly, very slowly from our point of view, lengthening.
It isn’t, not always. Because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, the moon isn’t always the same distance from earth. This why we get things like Annular Solar Eclipses, where the moon is right in front of the sun, but only covering it partly (creating a ring of sunlight around the moon, very cool)
You know how on the mara-go-round you feel a pull outwards even when you start in the middle? Yeah thats the moon. It was closer before you were born and after you die it will be further
one of the prime examples theorists use for the simulation argument and honestly, it’s too perfect Lol
How does one shoot dozens of rounds and perfectly hit the center of the target once?
The moon needs to be at the right position at the right time and viewed from the right position for the observer to see a perfect total solar eclipse.
And even if it is a total eclipse, it might cover more than necessary.
So calling it the perfect distance is a bit far fetched.
Also the moon is drifting away from earth at a few cm per year.
So in the end it’s just a game of chance that some of us are able to view a perfect total solar eclipse.
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