Why does the moon have so many craters when Earth doesn’t have, even though Earth’s gravity is stronger and it should be the one attracting the comets?
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If you’ve ever belly flopped into water, you’ll know that even something like water can be pretty hard under the right conditions. The truth is that a lot of meteors fall towards the earth daily, but they’re going really fast and when they enter the atmosphere, the friction gets them hot enough to turn them into dust, so very few of them actually reach the ground, and the pieces that do reach the ground are often small and they’re not going that fast. In contrast when a meteor hits the moon it’s going at full speed when it impacts the surface. That being said there are a lot of large impact craters on the earth, they’re just less apparent since the landscape isn’t barren.
have you seen our mountains and stuff!! the moon is MUCH FLATTER
not an answer but just saying
Atmosphere.
It serves two purposes.
1. Objects burn up in it and as such are less likely to impact thus when they strike earth they are less likely to make it down in one piece if they make it down at all therefore fewer craters are formed.
2. Erosion. The earth does get hit. quite a bit over the history of the earth but our atmosphere allows us to have wind, rain and plant growth etc… which all erode craters over time. The moon doesn’t experience erosion so a footprint in soft dusty moon soil from 100 years ago will still be there today just like even a tiny crater from an object the size of a penny hitting the moon a thousand years ago will still be there today where that same footprint and same crater would have long since been eroded away on earth due to wind, water, plant growth etc…
In my astronomy class we learned it’s cause the Earths surface is newer than the moons surface . We have active volcanoes on Earth that push new rock to the surface whenever it erupts . Also the moon has no atmosphere, and no active volcanoes
An ELI5 attempt here.
Earth does get more meteors and other space rocks. However, Earth has things that erase the craters.
1. Earth has the atmosphere. Air doesn’t seem like much, but the Earth has so much air, it becomes very powerful. So when a rock hits the Moon, it makes a crater. When a rock starts to get close to the Earth, the air turns the rock-hard meteor into something softer and spread out, so most don’t make a big crater.
2. When the rocks are big enough to make a big crater on the Earth, we have water and wind. This acts like giant sandpaper to ‘smooth out the hole’ over time. For examples of holes that are ‘wearing out’ look at the Yosemite Caldera (volcano), and the Chicxulub crater, which scientists didn’t even know was a crater.
Meteors burn all up or go splash into the water almost always. Big ones get little before they land because the air way up high burns it up. Sometimes they do hit land. A great example was the meteor that flew over us and landed one state north.
Because it doesn’t have an atmosphere, so hurdling space rocks and debris are easily able to hit the moon. As for Earth, it burns up most of the debris that come towards us before it even enters the atmosphere. We get about 50-ish meteors a day, yet they rarely ever make it through.
Isn’t one of the reasons that the moon also acts as a giant shield or something? I don’t remember the specifics.
off-topic, but absolutely fascinating fact that I learned from Neil DeGrasse Tyson
early astronomers were baffled by how all the craters on the moon are circular and not tear-drop, because they realized there was no way in hell everything that hit the moon would’ve hit it square on
turns out, it’s because when meteors impact celestial bodies at the speed they’re going, they obliterate into energy, and the explosion of matter turning into energy creates a bigger footprint than the impact itself
side fact: that’s why ICBMs only carry nuclear warheads. because the obliteration of the rocket on impact would produce a larger explosion than a conventional warhead
Falling space rocks get slowed down by the Earth’s air, so when the space rocks reach the ground, they don’t make dents. The moon doesn’t have air, so space rocks don’t get slowed down.
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