Why doesn't the moon spin like the earth?

Answer 1

It does spin, at about the same rate that it orbits the Earth, that is why we always see the same side of the moon all the time.

To answer your next question which may be "Why does it spin at the same rate as the Earth?". The answer is the Earth's tides. As the moon's gravity affects the Earth, the same happens the other way, the Earth's tidal force affects the moon. The moon used to spin much faster, but the Earth's tidal force has slowed its rotation down to the current rate.

Answer 2

The Earth has more mass than the moon, so when the Moon used to spin more, tidal forces caused stresses which slowed the spin down to a rate where the Moon always presents the same face to the Earth. This is called being "tidally locked". Possibly this happened when the Moon was molten, as liquids would slosh around and form a big crest facing the Earth and a crest on the opposite side as well, slowing down any rotation (relative to the Earth only).

The Moon still rotates, but at the same speed as it revolves around the Earth, about once every 27 days. As you may have heard, from the way the Moon turns with respect to the sun, daytime and nighttime on the Moon are two weeks long each.

Answer 3

The Moon does rotate, It has day length of just over 28 days. If the moon didn’t rotate then it would show different faces to the Earth as it orbits us, and there would be no ‘dark side’.

The Moon doesn’t appear to rotate to an observer on Earth because gravitational forces have forced the rotation of the Moon to synchronise with the Earth, the two bodies are tidally locked. As a result the moon rotates at exactly the same rate as it orbits the Earth. It orbits once a month and it rotates once a month.
>>>>> But just why does the earth rotate anyway?

It’s called conservation of angular momentum. The Earth condensed out of a massive cloud of dust and rock billions of years ago. That cloud was all spread out over billions of miles, it covered the entire circular orbit path we take around the Sun as well as stretching half way to Mars and halfway to Venus. It was big cloud. And it was spinning very slowly because of the way it was formed.

The cloud gradually condensed under the influence of gravity and became a small Earth. But when a spinning object gets smaller it can’t just stop keep spinning at the same speed, it has to keep spinning faster. You can see this principle applied by ice skaters working up speed. They start spinning with their arms out to make themselves bug, but when they pull their arms in the get smaller and spin faster. The same thing happened with the Earth. When all that spinning dust got pulled in from billions of miles away the Earth got smaller, and as a result it started spinning a lot faster. So fast in fact that it became noticeable to observers on Earth ( if there had been any) that the Earth spun around totally once a day.

Of course it took another 2 or 3 billion years for life to arise, and another 4 billion years for life to get clever enough to figure out that the Erath did rotate and that the sun wasn’t whizzing around us.

Answer 4

Because the tidal effect of Earth on the Moon has taken away all its rotational energy.

The Moon is taking away the Earth's rotational energy and Earth's spin is slowing down. However, Earth is far more massive than the moon, therefore:

1) Earth has a much greater tidal effect on the Moon than the Moon has on Earth (about 50 times more) and
2) Earth's rotational inertia is far greater than the Moon's,so it takes a lot more braking energy to slow it down.

However, the Moon does spin: it spins once for every orbit around Earth. If you were to stand on the Moon, you'd see the sun rise, climb, pass the meridien, descend then set (almost 15 Earth days after sunrise).

You would also see the stars go around (much slower than they do on Earth: once around in 656 hours instead of 24 hours).

Answer 5

nicely this hasn't been reported yet, yet to guarantee that the moon to revolve around the earth that quickly, it would might want to be a lot in route of the earth besides. So besides to transferring in the course of the sky by ability of a bunch of degrees in about 12 hours out of each and every 24, the moon might want to also look fairly huge. Tidal consequences on earth might want to be better too. perchance you would have extra lunatics. Which'd be reliable for Yahoo i'm confident.

Answer 6

Another commonly asked question.

It does spin, but its spin time is the same as its orbital time around the Earth, so it keeps same face to us.

Basically, we on Earth are the only ones who see the same face of the moon. To every other part of the universe, the moon revolves.

Its same as if you stand in the middle of a room and your friend circles you and keeps facing you throughout. To anyone else in the room, they will see her front, side, back and so on as she circles. In other words she is spinning (albeit slowly) at the same time as orbiting you.

PS - every object in the universe spins in one way or another. "Stationery" is an earthly thing. Out there everything moves, everything revolves.

Answer 7

Moon's rotation matches that of its revolution around the Earth. It's called synchronized rotation.

Answer 8

Hi. I spun much faster when it was young. The Earth caused tides which slowed the rotation to it's present value. The 'high tide' of rock still faces us.

Answer 9

they say that the moon to earth is tidally locked. if that were the reason why then how can pluto and its moon charon be as well? pluto is said to be sold ice rock, so how is it, pluto's moon charon is tidally locked as well? charon moon acts just like earths moon as in only one side can be seen.

Answer 10

No one relay knows for sure. They are not even sure how the moon got here.