This is simple. The thing I struggle with is how we only see one side of the moon.
🌜 Wait a sec... there's more than one side to the Moon?!? 🌛
There's at least a few discussions of this on FR, and good links offsite, but a couple of offsite links is what got nuked in post #3.
Bodies in prograde motion participate in the tidal transfer momentum, whereby the rotational motion is slowly lost and pushes the other object (parent or satellite) away into ever-higher orbit. The Earth is 100 times more massive than the Moon, and (assuming the Moon used to rotate all the time while in orbit) the Moon eventually ran out of rotational momentum. Obviously it still turns on its axis per se, otherwise it would not show the same face all the time.
Whoops, “tidal transfer OF momentum” not “tidal transfer momentum”.
One thing that has always intrigued me is the sun is 400 times bigger and 400 times further away than the Moon, making them appear the same size.
What are the odds of that happening in a totally random universe?