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Moment Of Um

Can a moon have a moon?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.41.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2024

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One of the best things about looking up at the night sky is gazing at our big, beautiful moon. But why do we get to have all the fun? Can a moon have its own moon? Harvard graduate student Chantanelle Nava helps us understand.  Do you have a Moment of Um question for us that’s totally far out? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help you find the answer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

0:06.0

Answering those questions that make you go, um, um, um, moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Mark Sanchez.

0:27.7

Um.

0:29.5

Whether you're an astronomy enthusiast or night owl or just a good old-fashioned dreamer, there's nothing better than looking up at the night sky and gazing out at our big,

0:39.6

beautiful moon. But what makes citizens of Earth so lucky that we get our own moon? Has anyone

0:45.8

ever thought to ask our own moon if it wants its own moon? I mean, it's only fair, right?

0:51.3

My name is Tate from St. Paul, Minnesota.

0:57.9

And my question is, can a moon have a moon?

1:00.0

Yeah, that's a great question.

1:03.7

So my name is Shantanel Nava, but I go by Shawnee for short.

1:08.9

And I am a fourth-year astronomy graduate student at Harvard.

1:14.6

And I specialize in exoplanet research. So just like here on Earth, we orbit the sun when we look out in the night sky and we see all those stars out there,

1:18.4

they all have planets too. And so those are what I study. I actually had to do a little bit of

1:23.1

thinking about this and a little bit of research myself because my initial thought was, yeah, sure,

1:28.1

why not? I think a moon could have a moon, but we haven't actually observationally seen any moons

1:33.8

that have their own moons. So in our own solar system or looking at exoplanet systems,

1:39.1

with exoplanet systems, we haven't found any moons. But in our own solar system, we're pretty

1:43.1

sure that none of our moons have

1:44.9

their own moons. That being said, there's really no reason to think that a moon couldn't have some other

1:51.0

smaller rock orbiting it. And that's what a moon's moon would be, just another rock orbiting that moon,

1:56.1

just like the moon is orbiting its planet. Another thing they'll say about a moon orbiting a moon is it

2:00.5

would have a

...

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