A moon colliding with Earth might sound like a surreal doomsday scenario or a sci-fi disaster. However, such catastrophic collisions may be common for some planets in other star systems.
A new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society uses computer simulations to show that collisions between exoplanets and their moons, called exomoons, may indeed occur on a regular basis. has been shown to have dire consequences for alien life budding on these planets.
Astronomers have yet to reliably detect extrasolar moons, but scientists expect them to be abundant in space.
Jonathan Brande, an astrophysicist at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. Thus, theorists such as Brad Hansen, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the new study, have wondered how alien moons and exoplanets might interact, and how these interactions might occur. I am interested in investigating how it affects the potential for life in distant star systems. .
runaway moon
Gravity governs interactions between planets and their moons, and manifests itself in other effects such as tides and the slow retreat of the moon. Every year, Earth’s moon moves an inch or so away from our planet, and its orbit is getting bigger. At the same time, the Earth is slowly rotating a little bit each year. These two effects are directly related. The Earth contributes some of its angular momentum to the Moon’s orbit from its rotation.
If this trade-off persists long enough, the Moon could end up looking like this: unbound from earth. Thankfully for us, this process takes so long that the sun exploded long before the moon had fully escaped. Especially around exoplanets, where the Earth is much closer to its star than it is to the Sun, collisions within the first billion years of the planet and its ‘unstable’ moon formed, and this situation escalated much faster. It can evolve. (For comparison, the Earth and its Moon are about 4.5 billion years old).
In his simulations, moons that had departed from their host planet would often burst back, colliding with the planet and creating giant dust clouds. Because it was heated, it glowed in the infrared. However, it took only about 10,000 years before they disappeared. It’s the blink of an eye in space.
Observations from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer Space Telescope suggest that every star experiences one such event at some point in its life, Hansen said. These dust emissions likely represent a collision between the planet and its moon, he added.
But these dust clouds are so short-lived that astronomers have only seen about 10 of them. Additionally, some astronomers are still not convinced that these dust clouds are from extrasolar moons, and instead believe they may have been caused by a collision between two planets. suggesting. In any case, more observations are needed to elucidate the role of exo-moons in the evolution of exoplanets and determine whether these collisions could affect alien life.
“The moon is often considered useful,” said Hansen. They are thought to help stabilize the tilt of the planet’s axis, creating milder seasons that are conducive to life. This advantage is definitely outweighed by destroying the
“Every few weeks some CGI videos It went viral, indicating that the Earth was being destroyed by some gigantic cosmic influencer,” Brande added. Not the best result in the search for extraterrestrial life, but still worth knowing. “
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