What would happen if the moon disappeared?
Just a thought experiment — if the moon suddenly vanished, what would happen to Earth? No more tides obviously, but would anything else change? Would the Earth wobble differently? What about animals that depend on moonlight? How dark would nighttime be?
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3 Answers
Be careful about 'common sense' here — a lot of science is counterintuitive. The whole point of doing experiments is that the universe often doesn't work the way our gut tells us it should. The Earth feels flat and stationary, after all.
There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.
This is actually a much deeper question than it appears on the surface. The simple answer most textbooks give is technically correct but misses a lot of nuance. Let me try to explain it in a way that captures the full picture.
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