The supermoon is, for the scientific popularizer Miguel Gonçalves, a “marketing” phenomenon, which is still appreciated if it increases people’s “affection” for astronomy. But the truth is that the term used to describe the Moon this Monday night, he explained to TSF”from the scientific point of view there is nothing”.
“For any scientist who studies the Moon, the Moon is always super. We are on this planet due to its action and the Moon is in charge of stabilizing the Earth’s axis of rotation (…). Without the Moon we would not have the conditions that we have for habitability on our planet and, therefore, it is always great”, he pointed out.
Miguel Gonçalves acknowledges that the Moon can even “seem a little bigger”, but anyone who is used to seeing the full moon will barely notice any differences: “The closer to the horizon [a Lua] she is, rather a strange impression, shall we say, it seems to us”.
According to the site of the North American Space Agency (NASA), a superlua – a concept attributed to Richard Nolle, in 1979 – occurs when the Moon cheia or nova is about 90% from its perigeu, or its closest point from the earth.
This July supermoon is the first of the four full moons this year that coincide with the passage of the Moon through its perigee: there are two more of these occasions in August -on the 1st and the 30th- and a last one in September, on the 28th. .
Source: TSF
