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Why does the moon shine?

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.

 

Picture Credit : Google

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