20 Interesting Facts About Moon / Think More

 20 Interesting Facts About Moon

The Moon has always fascinated people whenever they look up at the night sky. As the Earth’s closest neighbor, the Moon has significantly helped us advance what we know about the universe. Next to our own planet, scientists have extensively studied the Moon. However, it still holds many mysteries despite how familiar it is at this point. Find out more about the space rock orbiting the Earth with these facts about the Moon.

Moon

Facts-

      1.    The Moon has a diameter of 3,474 km at its equator.
2.    At its poles, the Moon has an estimated diameter of 3,472 km.
3.    Scientists estimate its age at 4.53 billion years.
4.    The Lunar surface covers an area estimated at 3.79x107km².
5.    The Moon’s distance from Earth averages at around 384,402 km.
6.    The Babylonians made the first scientific studies of the Moon in the 5th Century BC.
7.    Anaxagoras first hypothesized that the Moon’s light came from reflected sunlight.
8.    Seleucus hypothesized that the Moon caused the tides in the 2nd Century BC.
9.    In that century, astronomers also roughly calculated the Moon’s distance from the Earth.
10. Scholars in the Middle Ages largely agreed that the Moon was round.
11. Galileo Galilei made the first telescopic observations of the Moon in the 17th Century.
12. Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi invented the modern naming system for Lunar features in the late-17th Century.
13. Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler used trigonometry to accurately calculate the height of the Lunar mountains in the 19th Century.
14. Also in that century, astronomers first theorized that volcanism didn’t make the Moon’s craters.
15. Early 20th Century studies on the Moon later confirmed that theory as fact.
16. The Moon’s crust measures 50 km thicker on its far side compared to its near side.
17. Its iron core has an estimated thickness of 480 km.
18. The Moon’s near side has over 300,000 craters with a width greater than 1 km.
19. It takes the Moon 27.3 days to make one orbit around the Earth.
20. The Moon orbits the Earth at a speed of 1.02 km/second.