Did Earth have a second moon at one time?

[AArdvark]

I read about this theo....

Hypothesis
And am asking for more input ( no Google)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Sure. I could see it.

[Jizaboz]

It does now but it’s further away and has a wide orbit

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I could see it if asked nicely.

[AArdvark]

Ok, now I Googled it...

The idea that our planet once had a second Moon goes back far in time.

In 1846, French astronomer Frédéric Petit, director of the Toulouse Observatory announced that he had discovered a second moon in an elliptical orbit around Earth. His claim was soon dismissed by astronomers, but Petit’s moon became a plot point in Jules Verne’s 1870 science fiction novel Around the Moon.

Some years later, in 1898 Dr. Georg Waltemath, astronomer from Hamburg, Germany said that he had located Earth’s second moon as well as a system of tiny moons. His discovery has never been confirmed by the scientific community and his claims were rejected. American astronomer William Henry Pickering (1858 –1938) studied the possibility of a second moon and suggested that the Moon itself had broken off from Earth.

Collision Between Two Of Earth’s Moons
If we skip forward to more modern times, we learn about an intriguing theory proposed by Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Martin Jutzi, at the University of Berne.

According to Asphaug and Jutzi, it is possible Earth did have another moon billions of years ago. These two moons would have co-existed in peaceful harmony for tens of millions of years, long enough for both moons to almost completely solidify.

However, eventually Earth’s gravity cause the two moons to migrate outward and when it happened they collided. The smaller moon would have been destroyed, its remnants coating half of the larger satellite.

[Tdarcos]

My understanding is that the various asteroids and pieces of them, plus the gas and dust ejected when the sun was formed, created the earth. (If we look at the current Harvard University rules for what is a planet, it has to have cleared out the space in its orbit.) The earth was a ball of molten iron. At some point another body struck the earth, the impact was absorbed, but it was like throwing a baseball at a molten iron basketball at 20,000 MPH. The projectile essentially shattered the earth into two pieces, the impact item gaining mass, the earth losing it. The projectile cooled and became the moon. The earth cooled, collected still more matter, then eventually became able to support life. Over millions of years, the moon drifted away a few centimeters a year until it ended up where it is now.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Flack has been trying to get your email address for a month.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There was a second moon.

Earth is the only planet in the known universe with a single moon, and Mercury and Venus the only known planets with no moons whatsoever.