What would happen if an object knocked our moon out of orbit and we no longer had a moon? What effects would that have on the enviroment, with tides and all. Im sure there are more effects than that but you get my question.
Hum, I would imagine that anything that could do that would create a huge strew cloud of impact debris that would fall onto the Earth. This would result in hundreds of thousands of Chicxulub sized killers raining down and melting the entire surface and blasting the atmosphere into space… So there would be no `environment` to survive around for…
I believe the posters question was more to do with the environment if the moon suddenly disappeared. Lets say there are no clouds or debris.
The most obvious effect would be that tides would be much lower. I believe the sun's effect is only about 1/3 of the moon's.
Smaller tides. Fewer romantic songs. No convenient source of Helium3 for fusion power. No farside of the moon for radio telescopes free of man-made interference. No adjacent gravity source to capture a proportion of threatening bolides. No more solar eclipses.
Hum, And it would get a lot darker and colder…as the Earth shifts orbit to further out…(or escapes the sol system).
Why would our orbit shift further from the Sun? Because the Earth-Moon system orbits the Sun as effectively one body, and it would suddenly be about 1.22% less massive? That wouldn't make much difference to our orbit, surely... not enough to cool the Earth too badly. After all, northern hemisphere summer occurs when Earth is actually furthest from the Sun. An extra 2 or 3 million miles' distance has much less effect on the climate than our axial tilt. In the long term, of course, the small tidal drag induced by the Sun alone would cause our rotational angular momentum to be transfered to orbital motion (in the absence of a Moon to pick it up). So Earth would orbit faster and recede from the Sun... but so slowly, it would take millions of years to significantly lengthen the year.
Hum, Well yeah, perhaps you’re right. It’s only a small difference but I suspect (too complicated for me to work out) that the orbit may become less stable (resonances etc) over time, and become more eccentric….
That could be a point, yes - given that Earth's orbit is currently the least eccentric of any major planet, and it is the only one with a sattelite so massive in proportion to itself (not counting Pluto of course, which seems more like a large Kuiper Belt planetisimal nowaday).
if I am not mistaken I think I heard somewhere that the earths axis would tilt up to 90 degrees without the moon stabilizing it. So what was once the North Pole could suddenly become the equator (by suddenly I don’t mean like 5 minutes, I don’t know how long that would take).
Correct Cato. We would have a much less stable axial orientation. I'm not sure it goes as far as 90 deg, but its way more than 23.
Venus has no moon, and its rotational axis appears to have flipped right over... to say nothing of whatever happened to Uranus.
