When the moon collides with a star in the sky, what happens to the star?

Question

Does the star stick to the moon?

Answer 1

The Moon does not collide with stars in the sky at all. If it did, it would be incinerated right along with the Earth.

Stars are huge, and very far away. The Moon simply passes in front of the stars from our point of view, hiding them temporarily. If you look at the same spot in the sky the next night, the star will still be right where it was before the Moon passed in front of it.

Look at something on the other side of the room. Hold your finger in front of your face, and move it across so that it hides the object for a moment. Your finger didn't collide with the object. Neither, then, does the Moon collide with stars.

Answer 2

The moon doesn't collide with stars in the sky, where did you ever hear that? The stars are BILLIONS of miles away, the moon is only 240,000 miles away. No way it can collide with a star.
Maybe you mean what they call an occultation - that's when the moon passes in front of a star and blocks the star from our view. Happens here on earth all the time. Have a friend walk in front of the TV - the TV doesn't stick to your friend because he's closer but for a moment you can't see the TV. That's an occultation of the TV by your friend.

Answer 3

Oh my, that is a question that suggests a little bit of information is missing...

The nearest star to the Moon is our Sun which is 93,000,000 miles away from Earth, and roughly that amount away from the Moon also because the Moon circles around the Earth.
One had best hope that the Sun never crashes into the Moon because everyone on Earth would be fried to a crisp before it ever struck the Moon.

The next nearest star to the Moon is 4.3 to 4.4 Light Years away from our Solar System and not heading toward us any time soon.

All of the rest of the stars are much farther away than those two.

Stars are huge, huge balls of hydrogen and helium gas which have a nuclear fusion process going on within them that converts hydrogen into helium. This nuclear fusion process is what makes the intense heat and light radiation that we see and feel.

Frankly, I think you meant to say, "What about those meteors and Asteroids that strike the Moon?" Those things have happened in the past, and will continue to happen because the Moon has no atmosphere to burn up the incoming objects like the Earth has. On Earth we see them coming into our atmosphere from far away and call them Shooting Stars. They are really small meteors. If, by chance, they fall to the surface of the Earth, then we call them Meteorites. Asteroids are much bigger and hopefully none will hit us any time soon. They hit the Moon on occasion and you can see the big marks that they have left on the surface because there is no water or rainfall to wash them away, or plants and trees to cover them up.

Answer 4

The moon orbits the Earth, and the stars are much much further away.

When the moon moves in front of a star or planet, we say the moon "occults" that object. Occulting in astronomy means concealing or covering.

Do you really think the moon just collides with a star? Huh?

Answer 5

Interesting that you put it that way round: "what happens to the star?" as though the star were the smaller of the two objects (like it was a bicycle run down by a juggernaut lorry).

I think you have not got a clear idea of the size and distance of various celestial bodies and are getting confused by what they look like into thinking

(a) a small object near to you must be larger than a large object further away from you. e.g. a tennis ball in your hand may look bigger than a football on the pitch, viewed from a seat in the stands, but we know what size a football is and our brain can correct the false impression our eyes have formed that footballs are tinier than tennis balls.

The problem of course is that we have never seen a moon or a star so close up(within 100 yards) as to have a comparable experience of what they really look like.

(b) objects in the same line of sight as one another from earth are close to one another in space.

Lots of people assume stars in the same constellation as one another must be physically close to one another, but this is incorrect, They can be at all kinds of distances from one another and from earth: it is simply a line-of-sight phenomenon you are viewing and misinterpreting.

(c) The idea that a "shooting star" is a star that burns out and dies in our skies is similarly a misinterpretation of what you are seeing. It isn't a star but a grain of dust (debris from a comet) that burns up in our atmosphere and is part of a meteor shower.

HOW FAR AWAY ARE THE STARS IN FACT?

The nearest star (after the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 26 trillion miles away from us whereas the moon is only a quarter of a million miles away from us.

There is therefore no possibility of the two colliding with one another. They do not even come close. They merely line up in a line of sight optical illusion of closeness but it ain't real.

HOW BIG ARE THE STARS IN FACT?

Stars vary in size considerably but an ordinary Main Sequence yellow dwarf like the Sun could accommodate 1,300,000 Earths within its volume and the Earth can accommodate about 50 Moons within itself. So the Sun is about 65 million x the size of the Moon.

So if there were ever a collision between an object the size of the Moon and an object the size of a star and anyone asked what happened to the star, one response would be for the star to reply in its best Rafe C Nesbitt accent ... "Never mind me: you should see what happened to the other guy!"

Answer 6

I hope this question is a joke.
Any star is so large and hot (Our sun is a relatively small star compared to most you can see) It would burn our moon and the Earth to a crisp long before we could collide with it.
I guess you could say we would stick to IT.
But don't worry, It isn't going to happen .
And they are VERY far away, that is why they look so small.

Answer 7

If it is a movie star and a cardboard moon, the moon could very well be destroyed by the star.
If the star was glued with honey, the moon could very well stick to the star.
Einstein was of the same opinion.
I know it, because he told me so one day we were trout fishing together in the Yellowstone park.
Fly fishing of course!

Answer 8

This can never happen because the Moon is very close to us and very very far from any star other than the Sun.

Answer 9

three things

1. stars don't collied with the moon
2. if it does happen it would be the moon colliding with the sun
3. nothing can stick to a star, they are mad of gas

Answer 10

The moon is millions of miles away from any stars.