Does the moon have a face? It looks as if it does. There are dark patches on the moon called "maria". "Mare" is Latin for sea, "maria" for seas. But there's no water on the moon. And so there are no real seas either. The "maria" are flat areas formed by old volcanic eruptions. The lunar surface also has many craters where it has hit by space debris.
Have you ever seen "shooting stars"? They're really meteors: fiery fragments of space debris. Most debris from outer space burns up as soon as it enters Earth's atmosphere, the layer of air around the planet.
Sometimes a meteor is so big tat it hits Earth before it has time to burn up. Then the meteor is called a meteorite. A large meteorite can create an enormous crater on Earth. That happened once 65 million years ago before people lived on Earth, in the time of dinosaurs. The impact created a series of natural catastrophes. These days, most scientists think that the dinosaurs - and a lot of other animals and plants - were wiped out by that meteorite.
Around the moon there is no atmosphere as there is on Earth. That's why even the smallest piece of space debris can hit the moon without burning up.
Long ago, meteorites damaged the moon's surface and lava flowed out from inside the moon. That explains how a "mare" is a sea, not of water, but of cooled volcanic rock.
Nothing grows on the moon. The lunar landscape is bare and barren.
What Dog Knows, P110-111
Sylvia Vanden Heede, illustrated by Marije Tolman
ISBN 978-1-776570-37-9
No comments :
Post a Comment