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Asked by anon-278346 on 26 Jan 2021.
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Michael Nolan answered on 26 Jan 2021:
The moon is (1) not made of cheese and (2) has no man on it!
The moon is quite similar to earth in its make-up, which we have determined from analysis of rocks from the Apollo Moon Landings. The current theory is another body crashed into the young earth and the moon split off from the earth, locked into orbit around our planet. Therefore it should have similar composition to Earth.
I think there will be others here who can go into this in more detail.
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Graham Shields answered on 27 Jan 2021:
The Moon formed out of molten rock thrown out into space after a planet about the size of Mars crashed into the Earth. That was during the early days after the solar system formed. That’s why the Moon is very similar to Earth’s rocky outer parts (mostly made of magnesium silicate) but it does not have a large metal core like our planet. The Moon is large enough to collapse under its own gravity and so is almost perfectly spherical like a ball. But it is small enough that gravity does not keep much water on its surface and so its really dry inside and out. Gases also escape its atmosphere, which is very thin. The Earth, being much bigger, has not entirely turned into solid rock, but the Moon has long since frozen all the way through.
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Tony Butcher answered on 28 Jan 2021:
Two more interesting facts:
– There is no erosion (from an atmosphere like ours, or plate tectonics) – that’s why we can still see all the craters from where meteorites/asteroids have hit it over billions of years.
– We only ever see one side of the moon (the other side is ‘the dark side’!), so people think it doesn’t rotate, but it does – it just happens to do one full rotation in the same time that it takes to orbit around the Earth, so the same side always faces us 🙂
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