Split Space Station


Earth's mysterious large Moon is our nearest neighbor in space, dominating our clear night sky with its beguiling and bewitching cold golden glow. Earth's Moon is the only body beyond our planet that we have visited, leaving our footprints embedded in its alien dust. Despite its close proximity to our planet, our mysterious Moon has still managed to keep some ancient secrets from us very well. However, in October 2014, using data derived from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, a team of planetary scientists announced that they may have solved a lunar mystery almost as old as our Moon itself. The ring around the Earth eventually began to condense into blobs that then proceeded to merge and create a large and brightly glowing sphere--our primordial Moon. Our Moon would have appeared to be ten times larger than it does today in Earth's ancient sky--if anyone had been around to see it. When Jupiter was born along with the rest of our Solar System, approximately 4.56 billion years ago, it twinkled like a star. The energy that it emitted--as a result of tumbling surrounding material--made Jupiter's interior searing-hot. In fact, the larger Jupiter grew, the hotter it became. At long last, when the material that it had drawn in from the whirling, swirling surrounding protoplanetary accretion disk--made up of nurturing dust and gas--was depleted, Jupiter may well have attained the enormous diameter of over 10 times what it has today. It also may have reached a truly toasty central temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. During that long ago era, Jupiter twinkled, glittered, and sparkled like a little star, shining ferociously with a fire that was approximately 1% that of our much more brilliant Sun today.