[Physics] If the moon had a mirror surface, would the earth be equally illuminated as by the sun during full moon, or would it require a different mirror shape

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Suppose the apparent diameters of the sun and the moon are exactly the same (which in fact very close to the real situation). If the moon had a perfect mirror surface, would the reflected visible light of a full moon (at night) illuminate the earth with the same intensity as the visible light of the sun would do?

Or would this only happen if we place a giant flat perfect mirror which reflects the light of the sun during the night so that every person on the night side of the earth could see the sun?

Best Answer

No, because of the sizes of their surfaces. Let's make these simplified assumptions:

  1. The Earth and the Moon are both spheres 1 AU from the Sun.
  2. The total amount of sunlight an object receives is proportional to the solid angle it takes up from the Sun's point of view.
  3. The Sun and the Moon are each visible from a hemisphere of the Earth.

Then the total amount of sunlight received by the sunlit hemisphere of Earth is proportional to the square of the Earth's radius, while the total amount of sunlight received by the sunlit hemisphere of the Moon is proportional to the square of the Moon's radius. Since the Moon is ≈1/3.67 the radius of Earth, it receives ~1/13.5 the total amount of sunlight.

Certainly, even a perfectly reflective Moon can't reflect more sunlight than it receives, so even if all of the light bouncing off of the Moon reached the Earth it would only provide brightness comparable to a cloudy day.

Of course, owing to the geometry, most of the light bouncing off of the Moon doesn't land on Earth; it goes off into space in directions that miss the Earth completely. Making another simplifying assumption, I think we can say that the fraction of it that reaches Earth is proportional to the fraction of the Moon's sky taken up by the Earth. The Earth has an apparent size of about 2 degrees as seen from the Moon, so its angular size is $2\pi\left(1 - \cos\frac{2^\circ}{2}\right) \approx 0.00096$ steradians. A hemisphere is $2\pi$ steradians, so the Earth occupies about 0.00015 hemispheres (about 0.015% of the Moon's sky). Now we have that geometrically, a perfectly reflective Moon should illuminate the Earth at about $\frac{0.00015}{13.5} \approx \frac{1}{90,000}$ the intensity of the Sun.

In real life, the light from a full Moon is about 1/480,000 the brightness of the noon Sun. Given the Moon's albedo is somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 depending on the angle of incidence, and given the huge simplifications made in the above math, I think this indicates that we're in the right ballpark.