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Re: moon's synchronism

On 24 Mar 1998 11:17:29 Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca> wrote:

... "Another torque acting on the Moon's orbit is due to the quadrupole
moment of the Earth"... I should have mentioned that it is the reaction
to this torque, the torque exerted by the orbiting Moon on the Earth,
that is partly responsible for the precession of the equinoxes. The
Sun is responsible for a smaller but significant contribution to this
precession.

1) Can it (librational shaking of the Earth) be also responsible for
other things, such as motions of tectonic plates, volcanos and
magnetic reversals?

2) A nice way of referring to librations of the Moon is to say that they
exist because the center of mass of that large spherical object does
not coincide with its center of weight. The center of weight is closer
to the Earth than the center of mass. To keep it simple I am thinking
about an ideal circular orbit.

3) Librations of the Earth would be "as strong", and would have the same
period, as librations of the Moon if the two objects had identical
masses. But the mass of E is about 80 times larger than that of M.

Ludwik Kowalski ! I hope this will be the
Department of Mathematics and Physics ! name of my department
Montclair State University, N.J. ! when the Computer Science
! Deptartment is formed.