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Full Moon

    MILLION-YEAR PICNIC

    When Moonlight Whispers Dark Imaginings

    Why does folklore link full Moons and human behavior?

    By

    Trick-or-treaters will be safe from werewolves this year, as the full Moon falls on Oct. 28. Halloween night will have a lovely, 89-percent-illuminated Moon rising as darkness falls, shining its silver light on any ghosts, ghouls, and goblins roaming about. It should provide a fitting ambience for the spookiest night of the year.

    The Moon inspires myths and legends, often with a scary or eerie twist. Maybe that’s because there is no other nighttime celestial object to match its size and brightness, and nighttime is when our hidden fears, kept at bay by the Sun, creep out to whisper all kinds of dark imaginings. Connecting the Moon with those whispers is an easy step to take.

    Lon Chaney Jr. in his memorable portrayal of the first modern werewolf. (Photo from the uncopyrighted Horror Monsters, vol. 1)

    Consider werewolves — or if you prefer a fancier term, lycanthropes. You’ll find tales of shape-shifting humans in many cultures, but the modern English werewolf descends from the Old English wer-wulf, which in turn descends from the Proto-Germanic wira-wulfaz: man-wolf. The Romans called them versipellis, or turn-skins. Variations of the creature exist in the folklore of the Celts, the ancient Greeks, India, Mesopotamia, and other cultures dating back thousands of years.

    The details vary, but basically a werewolf is a person who can change shape into a wolf (or wolf-human hybrid). When in wolf form, they are usually wild, ferocious, and hungry for human flesh. But not always. In some legends, werewolves are wise shamans who are honored guardians of sacred lands.

    Most Americans learned from movies that people afflicted with lycanthropy take on their wolf forms when there’s a full Moon. This idea, though, is rarely found in the many variations of the werewolf legend. The full Moon-werewolf connection became horror canon only with the 1943 movie Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

    Unless you were a scholar of obscure French folktales (in which there are references to full Moon transformations), you wouldn’t have connected werewolves and full Moons until you saw Lon Chaney Jr. undergo his terrifying (for the time) transformation on the big screen. The rich imagination of screenwriter Curt Siodmak has left a lasting mark on modern popular consciousness.

    Then there’s lunacy. We get this word from the Latin lunaticus, which itself contains luna, or moon. Lunacy and lunatics are now nonmedical and pejorative terms for irrational behavior, but the terms originated in ancient medical practice. Some doctors of the ancient world (and well into the Middle Ages and beyond) believed that certain psychiatric and neurologic disorders, such as schizophrenia and epilepsy, were caused by the Moon. These patients were categorized as lunaticus, roughly interpreted as “living on the Moon.”

    Before you laugh at the doctors of centuries past, consider the common modern notion that people act wild when there’s a full Moon. You’ve probably heard that traffic accidents, violent behavior, and psychiatric cases at hospital emergency departments all spike on nights of a full Moon. But none of those correlations are real. Researchers have found no statistically meaningful correlation between the full Moon and erratic human behavior.

    The blood Moon’s red tint is sunlight that slips past Earth’s edges during an eclipse. With the blue and violet wavelengths scattered by our atmosphere, only orange and red are reflected back to us. (Photo courtesy NASA)

    The reason it can seem as if there’s a connection is called illusory correlation. When two or more significant events occur at the same time, we tend to see connections between them. If we notice a bright full Moon in the sky and hear about a fight breaking out between parents at a children’s soccer game that same evening, we may imagine a correlation between the two. But that doesn’t mean they truly are connected; it’s just how our minds work. We look for patterns.

    (And as a parent of a youth soccer player, I can assure you that sideline fights between parents occur on nights of crescent moons, when there’s no moon, and even on sunny afternoons.)

    One last Halloween-astronomy crossover topic I want to raise is that of the blood Moon. This is when the full Moon, normally bright white, turns dull red. It’s nothing to be afraid of: a blood Moon is simply another name for a total lunar eclipse.

    Lunar eclipses occur when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all align, with Earth in the middle. Our shadow in space then covers the lunar surface for a short time. This accounts for the dimming of its usual reflected light. The red tint is the small amount of sunlight that slips past Earth’s edges and through our atmosphere, where the blue and violet wavelengths are scattered, leaving only orange and red wavelengths to reach the Moon and be reflected back at us. While we’re on this subject: mark your calendars for the next total lunar eclipse on March 13, 2025.

    Terrifying transformations into werewolves. Full Moons causing lunacy. Blood Moons. Maybe our modern imaginations are not so different from those of the Bronze Age Celts or ancient Greeks. This Halloween, whether you’re trick-or-treating yourself or escorting younger goblins, take a moment to appreciate the not-quite-full Moon. It should be perfectly safe. Or is it? Awooo-ooooo!

    MILLION-YEAR PICNIC

    What Is the Moon?

    Part one of a brief history of the Earth’s constant companion

    By

    Moon
    On Saturday, our constant companion put on a once-in-a-blue-Moon display. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    The Moon is always with us. Even when we can’t see it, it’s there, gently tugging on our oceans and causing our tides. It hasn’t always been with us; the Moon formed a few hundred million years after Earth did. But over the 4 billion years since then, it’s proved itself to be a loyal companion. And the Moon will be with us until the end, when a swollen red Sun swallows the inner planets, about 5 billion years from now.

    The story of the Moon begins with the creation of our solar system. About 4.6 billion years ago, a star exploded as a supernova. That explosion sent a shock wave into the surrounding interstellar medium; the shock wave eventually collided with a vast cloud of gas and dust, maybe 65 light years across. That impact created areas of higher density within the cloud; higher density means higher gravity: the denser areas began to draw material in.

    Hundreds of these relatively dense knots of gas and dust, called pre-solar nebulae, formed within the cloud; each would become a star. We’ll zoom in on one of them. There’s nothing special about it, at least not yet. But there will be. This one will become our Sun.

    The temperature of this pre-solar nebula soared as gravity compressed it further. The process accelerated in a positive feedback loop of increasing density and increasing gravity. It had become a protostar, surrounded by a disk of rotating gas and dust. Finally, the density and temperature exceeded a critical threshold; hydrogen atoms began to fuse together, creating helium atoms and releasing enormous amounts of energy. A star was born: our star, the Sun.

    But the creation process was not finished. That disk of rotating gas and dust still surrounded the Sun. Molecules and dust within the disk collided as they orbited the nascent Sun. Sometimes they rebounded, and sometimes they stuck together. As the particles accreted and grew larger, their gravity grew stronger. The larger pieces attracted smaller ones, creating planetesimals, the building blocks of planets. They collided, grew, and formed planets, some large and some small, and of varying composition, depending on how far from the Sun they formed.

    What about the Moon, you ask? Hang on, we’re nearly there.

    The early solar system was a rough place. The eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — were not alone. The leftovers, the planetesimals that hadn’t become part of any planet, still hurtled about. These varied in size from pebbles or snowballs to objects as big as a small planet. Some were ejected from the solar system by gravitational interactions with Jupiter, the largest planet. Some settled into stable orbits; we now call these asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets (Pluto is one of these). And some collided with the planets.

    A large planetesimal, about half the size of Earth, struck us a glancing blow about 4.3 billion years ago. But even a glancing blow between two such large bodies was cataclysmic, completely melting Earth’s surface and launching a huge amount of molten rock and vaporized material into orbit. The debris formed a ring around Earth, much like Saturn’s rings; it would have been a lovely sight from the surface — if the surface had not been a hellscape of lava seas and poisonous gases at the time.

    But our ring did not last long (Saturn’s rings will also not last forever, but that’s another story). The accretion process played out once more, this time in Earth’s orbit. Over hundreds of years, which is a very short time in astronomical terms, the collision debris coalesced — small pieces became larger, the larger pieces collided and merged, and our Moon took shape.

    This intense early period of impacts gradually tapered off as the surviving denizens of the solar system settled into mostly stable orbits. On Earth, plate tectonics and wind and water erosion have erased those early impact scars, including the impact that nearly destroyed us, and which gave us our Moon. But the Moon’s cratered surface has preserved a record of those violent years and more recent impacts. We’ll focus on that surface next time.

    Until then, go outside on a clear night and look again at the steady companion that lights our night sky. Clear skies!

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