The Moon is nearest major celestial body and the only natural satellite of Earth. It is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and has been known since the prehistoric era. It's represented by the ☽ symbol. Like the word Earth, its English name has Germanic and Old English origins.
Throughout history, people have been fascinated and curious by the Moon's stark beauty, which has also sparked a rich spiritual and metaphorical legacy. The Moon was revered as a god in ancient cultures, and its power was most visibly demonstrated by its steady regulation of the tides and the cycle of female reproduction. The Moon (from the Latin luna, "Moon") is said to have the ability to cast magical spells, turn people into animals, and cause people's actions to err on the side of sanity. These are just a few of the ancient myths and legends surrounding the Moon. Long before astronauts from Apollo captured images of the Moon from orbit, poets and composers were describing the Moon's romantic pleasures as well as its darker side, and fiction authors were taking their readers on speculative lunar adventures.
The nature and origin of the Moon have been the focus of centuries of observation and scientific study. Calendars were developed as a result of early studies on the motion and position of the Moon, which also made tidal predictions possible. The Moon was the first new world that humans stepped foot on, and thanks to the data gathered from those missions, autonomous spacecraft data, and remote sensing studies, we now know more about the Moon than any other celestial body, with the exception of Earth. It is now evident that the Moon holds the secrets to unravelling the origins of Earth and the solar system, even if there are still many unanswered questions regarding its composition, structure, and history. Furthermore, because of its proximity to Earth.
The Moon is a spherical rocky mass that revolves around Earth in a somewhat eccentric orbit at a mean distance of roughly 384,000 km (238,600 miles), most likely with a small metallic core. With an equatorial radius of 1,738 km (1,080 miles), it has a somewhat flattened shape that causes it to expand slightly towards Earth. Its mass distribution is irregular; in addition to having surface mass concentrations, or mascons for short, that allow the Moon's gravitational field to intensify over specific regions, the centre of mass is shifted towards Earth by roughly 2 km (1.2 miles) with respect to the centre of the lunar sphere. While the Moon's magnetic field is not as strong as Earth's, some of its surface rocks.
It is currently thought by scientists that the Moon underwent intense heating over four billion years ago, most likely during its formation. This caused the Moon to differentiate, or chemically separate, into a less solid crust and a more dense underlying mantle. Lava erupted from volcanoes hundreds of millions of years later as a result of another heating cycle, this time caused by internal radioactivity. The average density of the Moon is 3.34 g/cm^2, which is comparable to the mantle of Earth. The Moon retains so little atmosphere that the molecules of any gases present on the surface travel without colliding because of its small size and mass, which results in a surface gravity that is only around one-sixth that of the planet.
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