Critics blast nuclear 'bomb' theory of moon's birth

I searched for this but could not find this posted earlier.

There was this speculation that the Moon was formed out of a nuclear explosion. There were several threads here on ATS too.

Now it seems that the moon may not have formed out of a nuclear explosion. There are many incosistencies in the theory.

Some of them are:

A nuclear explosion would melt the core of the earth and it would be then difficult to propel matter into the space

Planets with composition similar to the earth do not have moons (Venus)

Planets like Pluto also have a moon, and it is very cold so that a nuclear reaction cannot take place on it.

Marvin Herndon, an independent geophysicist based in San Diego, previously put forward the controversial hypothesis that uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, has sunk to the Earth's core and formed a "georeactor" several kilometres across (see Fire down below). But even he points out that such a reactor could not exist at the core-mantle boundary. That's because uranium is so heavy that when it liquefies in a nuclear reaction, it should fall to the Earth's core. "Meijer and Westrenem fail to realise that such a georeactor would melt itself down to the centre," he told me.

Others question the idea that heat from a runaway reactor would propel matter out of the Earth. Planetary physicist David Stevenson of Caltech is also sceptical. "The whole idea is not physically sensible," he says. "Life is too short to spend on things like this."

If the georeactor hypothesis is right, Gott questions why Venus did not form a moon in the same process, since Venus boasts a similar mass and composition to the Earth. "OK, it might have just been a fluke it happened to the Earth but not Venus," he says. "But how do you explain Charon, the big icy moon of Pluto? That would require an 'ice-reactor', which is a nonsensical idea!"

Source: www.newscientist.com...

reply to post by sunny_2008ny
'Critics' can say what they like. There's a widely accepted theory of how the moon was created. Instead of explaining it, here's a good image that charts its creation....