Humankind's fascination with the moon has been going on for a long time. Scientists began studying it after Galileo's time. Many theories as to how the moon was formed have been put forward over the course of nearly 500 years. The moon's origin story has been shed new light on by a group of scientists.
In a study just published in the journal Science Advances, the research team shows that the moon's noble gases came from Earth's mantle. The giant impact theory postulates that the moon was formed by a massive collision between Earth and another body.
There were meteorites from the moon to the farthest reaches of the earth.
Patrizia Will studied samples of lunar meteorites obtained from NASA. The basalt rock that formed the meteorites came from the interior of the moon. The rock was protected from the sun's rays and the solar wind by additional basalt layers after they were formed. The lunar glass particles were formed during the cooling process. The chemical fingerprints of the solar gases are retained by the glass particles. The findings show that the moon had noble gases. For the first time, solar gases were found in basaltic materials from the moon that weren't related to the lunar surface.
asteroids are able to hit the moon's surface without an atmosphere. The meteorites were ejected from the middle layers of the lava flow by a high-energy hit. In the form of meteorites, the rock fragments traveled to Earth. Many meteorite samples are picked up in the deserts of North Africa or in the "cold desert" of Antarctica where they are easier to find.
The lab instrument is inspired by the lyrics of the dead.
The state-of-the-art noble gas mass spectrometer named, "Tom Dooley", is located in the Noble Gas Laboratory at the University of Lausanne. The instrument's name came from the fact that the equipment was suspended from the ceiling of the lab to avoid interference with everyday life. The team was able to rule out solar wind as the source of the gases detected using the Tom Dooley instrument. They discovered that the neon was in a higher abundance than expected.
The Tom Dooley is the only instrument in the world that can detect such small concentrations of neon and helium. These noble gases were found in the grains of the 7 billion years old Murchison meteorite.
There is a search for the beginnings of life.
It is a major step forward to know where to look inside NASA's vast collection of meteorites. Professor Henner Busemann is an expert in the field of extraterrestrial noble gasgeochemistry. He thinks that researchers will look for noble gases such as xenon. They'll be looking for other volatile elements in the lunar meteorites.
It would be interesting to know how noble gases were able to survive the violent formation of the moon. Knowledge about how volatile elements can survive planet formation in our solar system and beyond could be used to create new models.
More information: Indigenous noble gases in the Moon's interior, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl4920 Journal information: Science Advances
All Rights Reserved © 2024
