What ancient secrets hide the surface of the Moon, covered with a crater and marked with cracks? New research suggests that giant meteor crashes played an important role in the lunar crust formation process around 4 billion years ago.
It is one of those areas of science with diverse competing ideas and assumptions, all of which are highly controversial. One suggestion that planetary scientists have had is that the magma rising from the lunar interior is primarily responsible for the formation of the crust that covers the Moon today.
But researchers found the giant meteorite proposal after studying a lunar rock brought from Apollo 17 Mission
These types of temperatures are usually only achieved by large-scale melting of the outer shell of a planet, which indicates that the Moon may have ended the way we see it now due to A heavy flap of massive space objects. .
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"When I first observed this rock, I was amazed at how different the minerals are from other samples of Apollo 17." says Ana Černok, planetary scientist, from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.
"Although smaller than a millimeter, the baddeleyite The grain that caught our eye was the largest I have seen in the Apollo samples. This little speck still has evidence of the formation of an impact basin that had hundreds of kilometers in diameter. "
The mineral baddeleyite, also known as zirconia or zirconium dioxide, indicates the previous presence of cubic zirconia, where very high temperatures come into play; it means that there are still signs of this incredible heat in the rocks that we can collect today on the Moon.
The discovery was made using a complex technique known as electronic backscatter diffraction, and also radiometric dating by age The analysis highlighted the formation of cubic zirconia more than 4.3 billion years ago, when the Moon was only a baby.
In total, more than 50,000 small grain measurements were made, showing the interlocking crystal orientations which are the telltale signs of cubic zirconia at very high temperatures.
The moon and the earth have A long story meteorite impacts, although more evident on the Moon: without erosion or tectonics of the plates, the impact craters remain fixed on the lunar surface.
It now appears that past impacts are responsible for the very formation of the lunar crust in the first place.
"The discovery reveals that events of impact of unimaginable violence helped build the lunar crust, not just destroy it." says geologist James Darling, from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.
"In the future, it is exciting that we now have laboratory tools to help us fully understand its effects on terrestrial planets."
The research was published in Nature astronomy.