Aim for the moon and shoot your way. In this episode of Dead Planets Society, hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea White try to split the whole thing in half. It’s a literal moonshot.
The moon in the night sky may be beautiful, but it’s the nemesis of many astronomers because its light is often brighter than the faint objects it’s trying to observe.Destroying the moon completely isn’t an option to solve this problem – or is it? Leah and Chelsea team up with experts Haim Benaroya at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, to resolve and clarify a long-standing grudge against the moon.
It would take an enormous amount of force not only to split the moon and turn the pieces into what McDowell describes as “the world’s largest ball pit,” but also to prevent gravity from snapping everything back together so quickly. Dew. A space jackhammer, or perhaps a zillion lasers, might help punch a hole in the moon, but it would take something much bigger to actually crack it open — perhaps a moonquake. It could be by harnessing the force, or by colliding one of the small worlds in the solar system with the moon.
The consequences of dividing the moon would be quite destructive overall. It could cause a heavy rain of lunar debris that could destroy life on Earth, and the moon’s influence on the tides would change dramatically. But it’s not all bad. When the moon’s molten core is released, it could create the largest and weirdest sculpture ever.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes wild ideas about how to tinker with the universe, from extinguishing the sun to causing a gravitational wave apocalypse, and applies them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.
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