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"The man in the moon came down too soon, and asked his way to Norwich, They sent him south and he burnt his mouth By eating cold pease-porridge."

-- Traditional nursery rhyme

It's human nature to see shapes and patterns all around us, and ascribe a meaning to what is actually just a random coincidence. The phenomenon is called pareidolia, and includes things like seeing the Virgin Mary in a piece of burnt toast, for example.

But some examples are more persistent than others -- like the Man in the Moon. It's not a real face, of course, just a quirk of how the dark areas (the lunar maria, or "seas") and lighter highlands of the lunar surface are arranged. Yet the illusion is powerful enough to have a Western mythology dating back thousands of years, inspiring all manner of nursery rhymes and literary references.

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And there's some interesting physics at work here as well, at least according to a new paper in the journal Icarus. See, the Man in Moon is always staring at us here on Earth -- or, if you want to be all science-y about it, those particular features of the lunar surface always face Earth.

It happens because the moon is locked in what's known as a "synchronous orbit": for every orbit it completes around the Earth, the moon also rotates exactly one time. So we always see that face.

But it didn't necessarily have to be that way; why is this side of the moon, and not the other, the one that faces Earth? There had to be a 50/50 chance of it being one way or the other. Or so astronomers have thought -- until now.

Two Caltech astronomers, along with an Israeli colleague, think that there's a perfectly good explanation why the Man in the Moon always faces us -- and it's not due to the proverbial coin toss. Rather, Oded Aharanson, Peter Goldreich, and Re'em Sari propose that it's due to the fact that the Moon spun around its axis much faster in the past than it does today. And the rate at which it gradually slowed its pace could explain why it eventually became locked in the current orientation.

Read the rest here:
Why the Man in the Moon is Always 'Looking' at Earth