Category Kids Queries

Heywood is known for putting in writing some very famous sayings that we still use today, like “the more, the merrier,” “a penny for your thoughts,” and “Rome was not built in a day.” Included among these proverbs is the line, “the moon is made of greene cheese.” This was meant to be a humorous addition to the proverbs, and wasn’t anything that was actually believed. It’s also important to note that in this context, “greene” refers to the cheese’s age and not color.

As with many of Heywood’s proverbs, “the moon is made of greene cheese” would become popular, and eventually make its way into common use.

On April fool’s Day in 2002, NASA released fake images from the Hubble telescope that “proved” the moon was made of green cheese. And in an early version of Google Moon, before high-resolution images of the surface became available, the closest zoom levels depicted a Swiss cheese pattern.

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Somewhere on the moon, there’s an American flag. It was put there by US astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on 20 July 1969, when they became the first two people ever to set foot on the moon. They set it up just as explorers used to do when they discovered a new area. What that gesture really means is ‘this land is ours’. But does the moon belong to the United States? No, because two years before that first moon landing, the Americans had signed the Outer Space Treaty. This states that no country can claim the moon or any other celestial body for its own, but that they belong to everybody. 

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The moon will look larger when it’s closer to the horizon, where trees, hills, and houses give it some perspective. (During occasional ‘’supermoon’’ events, the moon looks slightly larger because it’s at its closest point to Earth in its oval-shaped orbit.)

Humans tend to mentally exaggerate the size of the Moon with respect to the surrounding objects when it is on the horizon. This is because, unlike other everyday objects in the sky—airplanes and birds—humans have no context to determine the size of celestial objects. According to one psychological explanation of the Moon Illusion, this can force people to believe that the Moon is bigger when compared to the objects at the horizon like trees and buildings. This is similar to the Ebbinghaus illusion, which shows that when a circle is surrounded by larger circles, it looks smaller than when it is surrounded by smaller circles.

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The atmosphere closer to the horizon is much thicker and scatters the light, giving the moon (and sun) a reddish tint. When the moon is nearer to the horizon, its light has to pass through more of our atmosphere than when it’s overhead. This means colors like blue are scattered away even more so than before, while orange and red still reach our eyes. This causes the moon to appear orange when it’s still very much white when seen from outer space at the same exact time.

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The moon is made up of large dark volcanic rock. The moon is not like earth, instead of a hot core, the moon is completely cold and dead.  It doesn’t rotate or turn around like the earth either; it faces us in one direction. One thing that the moon does do is that it has an orbit around the earth.  The reason that we see the moon with a glow or shine, is because the light of the sun is reflecting off of the moon that is visible to us.

Think of the moon as a mirror. In the case of the moon, it’s really a bad mirror. Due to the fact that it is made up of such dark material, it reflects only about 12% of the light that hits it. The amount of light that gets bounced back to earth also depends on the time and place of the orbit of the moon.  When the moon’s orbit puts it in direct forward facing to the earth, we get a larger amount of light bounced back.

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One reason the moon has craters because it gets hit by objects, small pieces of rocks that come from outer space. These are pieces of asteroids, comets that are flying around in the solar system. When they hit the surface, there’s an impact.

The moon has no atmosphere, and so even a tiny rock will create a crater. Typically when you see an impact crater, the size of the crater is much larger than the size of the rock that created it. The rock is usually at least three to five times smaller, depending on the amount of energy generated.

Picture Credit : Google