MAN IN THE MOON

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 June 1937, Page 4

MAN IN THE MOON

' OLD THEORY REVIVED LONDON, April 5. Scientists have held and given one theory after another about the creation of the Man in the Moon, and now Dr. L. J. Spencer has given good reasons for going back to an old one. The marks on the moon are the splashes of meteors falling from space into the moon’s surface strata. The great objection to this theory used to be that since the falling masses of iron would come at the moon from all directions many of j the marks of contact should be oval instead of all being circular. The answer to this has been found by comparing the lunar craters with one or two early meteor-scars. In Australia and in Arabia the ground was churned up by a- falling star ages before man and there you can see the scars to-day and they are quite circular. Why?

Because these marks are not the marks of contact, but of the explosion which followed when the terrifically hot mass buried itself in the ground and burst.

If you could see by slow motion a drop falling into water you /would find that an instant after it buried itself beneath the surface a central cone of water was thrown up surrounded by a round trough and a ’wall. Here you have the lunar crater in miniature.

The meteoric craters in Australia and Arabia show that the heat of the. meteor was so great that it did not merely melt the sand, it boiled it. Now it is estimated that twenty million meteors strike the earth every day but thanks to atmosphere they are burned up before they can do us harm by striking our cities. The moon has no atmosphere and therefore no protection against the celestial bombardment.

Only one point puzzles astronomers and that is. Why are there no more craters being formed on the moon now? Has the Solar System been swept clean of the bigger meteors? With possibly one exception there has not been the slightest change on the moon’s surface since mankind watched her face first through tcTescopes.