Best response to moon landing conspiritists is to go one step further and when someone says NASA faked the moon landing just say "WHAT? You actually believe in the moon"
You should have included the times where Stephen asks a question about the Moon and someone (I think Rich Hall) says, "which moon are we talking about?"
He'd point out that to say that the "Earth has one moon" is wrong, is wrong. Because it might have some more, but it has that one. Then by the end he would say "Words just don't mean anything. Moon, planet, star, pick what you want and leave me alone! I just want to sit under my duvet and look at what I used to think was the Moon and think it's the Moon! Is that just too much to ask!?!?"
Series 26: Z, Episode 6: "One last Zany question for you all before QI winds down for the long nap and 'zzzZZZZs" it's way to the TV rerun afterlife; How many moons does the Earth have?" Allen Davis - "F---K it, I'm leaving."
He actually is making it up. Cruithne orbits the sun, not the earth. You might as well call everything in the solar system one of our "moons" if that is the case. It was also discovered in 1986 and not 1994. This show really needs better fact checkers.
I love how Alan puts his head in his hands at the end. This is my reaction too. It's so much simpler when you think of "the moon" as being the one and only.
With 'moons' and 'months' being from the same origin, I naturally thought that the American Indians (as depicted by Hollywood) were simply using the word to express a period of time. I'm now wondering if the primitive bastards thought it was a different moon each time!
It's fine for astronomers to tighten up definitions on a planet a little, but if they're going to pull out this "no moon" shit, they've gone mad with taxonomical power
The season one so called 'Moon' is actually in an elliptical orbit around the sun so cannot be classed as a satellite of the Earth, thus Alan was right. Up yours Stephen :)
3753 Cruithne is a Q-type, Aten asteroid in orbit around the Sun in 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth, making it a co-orbital object. It is an asteroid that, relative to Earth, orbits the Sun in a bean-shaped orbit that effectively describes a horseshoe, and that can change into a quasi-satellite orbit.
Just naming celestial bodies is not science. Also those thousands of rocks they found flying around would not qualify as moons, they orbit the Sun not the Earth.
"THE" moon also orbits the sun, whats your point. Reclassifying things can be scientific aswell as it may be discovered that they do something which was previously unknown and justifies a reclassification
I'm with Rich Hall on this one. There's only one moon and every subsequent answer just seems more ridiculous to me. The last one just seems to declare that NO moons exist. I mean Jupiter hasn't cleared Io, so is that not a moon either? Ah, you're just makin' this up.
For the second last answer I wonder if the 18,000 "moons" were created when the Moon hit Earth. There must have been a hell of a lot of debris which flew off but couldn't quite escape the Earth/Moon gravitational pull.
The tiny objects that could be labeled "satellites" are not the same as "the moon". There is only one satellite in orbit around the earth that is 1/6 its mass. And that object is "the moon".
I love how a compilation of this can be made purely by someone watching the repeats on Dave and then thinking. Hang on a minute The Moon has popped up a lot
Could the barycenter around which the Earth and Moon orbit each other, being within the Earth, be a candidate for yet another North and South pole (in addition to the 11 they talked about in some episode)?
@@frenne_dilley I would say no, since the geographic north pole (and south pole) exist on the axis on which the Earth spins. This is irrespective of the orbital plane of the Earth/Moon.
:06 Trick question! The definitions of Star, Planet, and Moon all have one primary thing in common. They are all Bodies of Mass in space! The differences are so minute that we might as well realize we are splitting hairs when we debate the terminology we use.
Not really. A star fuses hydrogen (unless it's near the end of it's life, when it will fuse helium and possibly other elements if it's large enough. A planet orbits a star. A moon orbits a planet. That's not splitting hairs.
"It must orbit the Sun" "The Moon fulfills the first two conditions" Yeah, that's definitely not how it works Stephen On another note, the Earth and Moon are not a binary system, the barycenter is very much within the Earth's radius, and so by definition the Moon orbits Earth.
Michael from the moon's point of view, the Earth also orbits the moon. I.e., In relativistic terms, if you were some distance away from both bodies, and you focused solely on the moon, then you would see the earth seemingly rotate in orbit fashion around the moon. The fact that the barycentre is within the Earth's radius is somewhat the relevant in this statement. Ok, so you could say that the Earth is a still body in this relationship, and the moon a spiralling body, and that would be sort of true (apart from the small wobble of Earth created by the moon's gravity as it rotates around the barycenter). I guess one must make the definition and the distinction of a moon as opposed to a naturally orbiting satellite like a large asteroid. In the same way, you must make the definition of a planet or planetoid different than a comet, say, like Halley's Comet, even though they are both celestial bodies that orbit the sun. Many of the asteroids floating around in our system, aren large orbits around the sun, but many are in horseshoe orbits around the various planets as well, giving them a quasi-orbital nature. But you wouldn't call them moons, any more than you would call them planets. That's why distinctions and definitions in the astronomical world are so difficult, and why people try so hard to define them with rules. It just gets confusing in the end, especially for kids at primary school. It's probably best to just keep it simple for them, and define a comet, asteroid, moon, planet and a star in simple defined forms. And leave it at that.
@@RB747domme That's a silly argument. In relativistic terms, you could apply that to any rotating body and say that the entire universe orbits it. The barycentre is in fact the defining part of this statement, and what makes Luna 'a moon' but Charon 'not a moon'. Halley's Comet is so defined because it originates in the Oort Cloud.
@@nugagim It would not be a binary system then. To my knowledge, every set of orbiting star systems with multiple stars never have the center of orbit within the radius of one of the stars which is why theyre always binary systems. Im not even sure if its possible due to the necessary mass range required for an object to be a star and the mass limit of how big a star can be before it collapses in on itself. Could be wrong, but I dont feel like doing the math.
I happen to know this so I must comment for the glory. Cruithne was named for the Irish Gaelic term for the Picts, but this name "Cruithne" is actually the word "Britons" passed through centuries of cultural divides. The Britons were known to have called themselves the "Pritani" in very ancient times. Though the Celtic languages of the British Isles were split between two groups: the P-Celtic branch, in Great Britain (and Gaul), and the Q-Celtic branch in Ireland. As a result the ancient Irish rendered "Pritani" as "Qritani", which when passing through centuries of linguistic mutation gave "Cruithne" in later forms of Irish. It is not known whether the Picts referred to themselves with any such word or not, but the Irish obviously saw them as "Britons".
The Earth and the Moon both orbit a common center of gravity. OTOH, that common center of gravity remains within the surface of the Earth, so one could argue that the Moon orbits the Earth. But in the cases of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the effects of their orbiting bodies are negligible.
>OTOH, that common center of gravity remains within the surface of the Earth, so one could argue that the Moon orbits the Earth. The moon never actually completes an orbit around the Earth. The Earth deflects its orbit around the sun. So it can be argued that Earth/Moon are a double planet / "binary system", as opposed to Jovian "true" moons like Ganymede that orbit entirely around Jupiter.
Take a drink every time Fry takes an enormous audible gasp of air through his gaping mouth mid sentence you'll be good and hammered by the end of the show!!😅
That's the beauty of it. Some people (i.e. idiots) see that as a weakness. Luckily, for those who prefer an unchanging and incorrect answer stated with an air of undeserved certainty, religion has them covered :)
When you get to the point of defining The Moon as Not A Moon, then perhaps you should come up with some other jargon for your celestial body terminology. Change the term 'moons' to something else, because clearly the canonical reference for a moon is The Moon.
Lets not forget that Earth goes around the Moon. we just notice it as much, because of the difference in mass, making the axial be very close to Earth center
The Earth does NOT orbit the moon. It orbits the Earth-Moon barycenter, which is located inside the Earth. The moon also orbits the same barycenter, which means that it can be said that it orbits the Earth (at least, it orbits a point inside the Earth).
I still wish one of them said: "Since you're asking 'how many Moons' and not 'how many satellites', the answer is still one, because 'the Moon' is it's name".
Naming celestial bodies is fucking stupid. There really ought to be no difference between moons and rocky planets, they're all just spheroids made out of solid material.
moon is a classification, "the moon" is a proper noun but he didnt ask "how many the moons (proper noun) are there" he asked "how many moons (classification) are there"
xøñχt is right. The name of our moon is also Moon. It is formally named that. Luna is not the scientific name you'd read in journals. The contestants (if you can call them that on here) didn't seem to know this fact. They seem to be pointing out that it's called The Moon because it's the only one, not that it's also its official name. You could say that the Moon is a moon. But that wouldn't be quite formal. It's defined as a natural satellite. I also agree with the comments here that IAU comes up with the weirdest and often useless arbitrary rules. Hence so much confusion about the moons, as evident with this video.
@@fahadus man people sucked at naming stuff back in the day. You see that moon what will we call it? I dunno maybe Moon. And what will we call the ball of earth we standing on. Hmm how about Earth. Great Job!
It would but it doesn't. Cruithne orbits the Sun upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Orbits_of_Cruithne_and_Earth.gif All this 'horseshoe' orbit nonsense is very misleading, it is just that it appears to follow a horsehoe shaped path from the frame of reference of the Earth. It is just an elliptical orbit around the sun.
If you look at the tracings of the orbits of the Earth and moon they tell you that due to the speed of their solar orbits, the sun and moon don’t actually orbit each other, they zig-zag across each other’s orbit.
The problem with this question is that Mr. Frye is using newly, or recently published theories. With astronomical, or celestial bodies, astrophysicists must come to an agreement on a term before it is accepted. And that could take ten years or more. Just because it has been published (that is the job of most researchers) does not make it a solid theory or even a valid theory. The academic world will them tear that theory apart for years, and if it still holds up over time, then the community will start giving it more credence. But to give it credence from the start, as Mr. Frye often did on this show with many things, is irresponsible. It is true that the definition of a moon is loose, but for most Astrophysicists, anything with a diameter smaller than about 30 km (app. 20 miles) is an asteroid. True, there are thousands of them orbiting the earth, but to confuse people by calling each of them a moon is ridiculous.
Until there is a definition that differs a "Moon" from a natural satellite and a Planet, "one" is also technically not correct. Most people think it's the size but there is no defined limit, neither for being "too small to be a moon" nor for "to big so it must be a planet". IMO currently the only correct answer would be "Nobody Knows"!
There is no moon. We all live in a simulation. It appears scientists got bored with counting moons and moved on to counting all the ways in which we do not exist. I'm starting to think we should get them scientists a proper job. Make the fucking nonsense stop.
The actual answer is that the Earth and moon together orbit around a point inside the Earth, so the moon is not a planet in its own right. No other near earth object has a stable orbit with the Earth, although Cruithne and some other objects do orbit the sun at times extremely near the Earth. 2010 TK7 is at least locked in position by the earth, but 2 months ahead of us in our cycle, so not particularly near to us. Oh, and there are tons of manmade satellites up there too.
The Earth does not orbit the Moon, nor does the Moon orbit the Earth. They instead orbit their collective centre of Mass, as is the case in the whole of the solar system. The Sun orbits the centre of Mass of the Solar System, it just so happens that that spot is somewhere near the centre of the Sun.
The definition of one body orbiting another is when the barycentre is inside the radius of one body. Therefore, the Moon orbits the Earth - not the other way around.
Well the moon and earth don't orbit eachother but they orbit a gravitational point between the moon And the earth where i believe is the place where both gravitational pulls level each other out
I think the real confusion here, stems from them refering the moon as a moon, when in fact the moon is not a moon but rather a natural satellite we have named Moon.
If "the moon" suddenly qualifies as a sister planet then what about all the other moons mentioned the series earlier? They must still be moons and the new answer was "no moon at all". The correct answer would be "all the moons except (the moon)".
The moon doesn't actually go all the way around the Earth from a stationary perspective. They interweave each other's orbits in their trip around the sun.
@@MrHenryG123 Aye, but the sensible thing to do is to quit while you're ahead and leave 'em wanting more. If QI had ended when Mr Fry left, we'd be remembering it as classic television. Carrying on past your sell-by date only diminishes the oeuvre. The Simpsons analogy is a apt one.
The real answer is "one". Words mean things. The show is playing a game of semantics because the official astronomical definition for "moon" isn't precise enough to exclude all the tiny, erratic objects moving around the solar system. As far as the **colloquial** definition, people *know* what a moon is. We wouldn't consider every random rock or dust particle around earth to be a moon.
Well, we _could_ call a "random rock" a "moon", depending on what it actually orbits. If it actually orbits the Earth (or to be technical, if the body and the Earth orbit a common barycenter), then it would be a natural satellite of Earth. Both of Mars' moons are smaller than a medium-sized city, but nobody has a problem with calling them "moons", while Jupiter has moons smaller than that
yeah but ceres and makemake have failed in clearing the neighborhood of celestial object since one is in the asteroid belt and the other is in the kuiper belt.
I'm just gonna add, a year later, cuz I'm a year smarter now; For a binary planet, the center of gravity would have to be equally between the two planets. For example if the Earth was at the same distance as the moon from venus, then it would be a binary planet, because both Venus and earth would revolve around their combined COG.
The problem is that two out of the three criteria the IAU settled on (BTW, without consulting any planetary scientists) are so badly written as to be effectively useless. Criterion 3 is bad because how cleared is "cleared" and how big a body's "neighborhood" is have never actually been defined. By some of the proposed criteria, Mercury wouldn't be a planet if you put it where Pluto is, because it wouldn't have cleared it's orbit. And under criterion 1, there aren't just 8 planets in the Solar System-there can only be 8 planets in the entire Universe. Criterion 1 says a planet must orbit the _Sun_ . Not "a star", but _our_ star. So all those "exoplanets" that Kepler has found? None of them can actually be planets, because they don't orbit the Sun. The IAU wanted to come up with criteria that eliminated Pluto, so they slapped something together and called it good. There are valid reasons for saying Pluto shouldn't be grouped with the classical planets, but the IAU definition is just crap
The Earth 'orbits' the Moon in the same way the Sun 'orbits' the Earth, all bodies in all orbital systems orbit one another, but the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system is deep inside the Earth so it's 'orbit' around the moon doesn't even clear its own radius.
