← 🪐 Space · usually met in Std 5-9
The Earth's one natural satellite. It causes the tides, steadies the planet's tilt, and always shows us the same face.
The Moon keeps one side towards us because its rotation and its orbit take the same time — tidally locked by the Earth's pull over billions of years. There is no permanently dark side; the far side gets just as much sunlight, we simply never see it from here. The phases are the changing fraction of the lit half that faces us, not the Earth's shadow, which only causes the much rarer lunar eclipse.
Its gravity raises tides in the oceans, with a smaller contribution from the Sun. It also holds the Earth's axial tilt steady, which keeps our seasons regular — without it, the tilt would wander and the climate with it.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “The Moon” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. ISRO ↗India's space agency — missions, instruments and results, first hand. NASA — the solar system ↗Planetary data and images from the people flying the spacecraft.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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