2023-07-20 04:00:03
Scientists have discovered a thermal anomaly on the far side of the Moon, providing new insight into our satellite. The origin of this hot spot is surprising: it probably comes from natural radiation emanating from an enormous buried mass of granite under a volcano that has been extinct for 3.5 billion years, a rock that is rarely found in large quantities (quantity is a generic term in metrology (count, amount); a scalar,…) outside the Earth.
Map of the far side of the Moon taken by NASA’s GRAIL mission. Recent observations have revealed a strange thermal anomaly (Thermal is the science that deals with the production of energy, the use of…), probably originating from a long extinct volcano.
Image: NASA/ARC/MIT
“It’s much more terrestrial than lunar in nature: the Moon has neither water nor plate tectonics, conditions favoring the formation of granite on Earth,” says Matt Siegler, lead author of the study, from the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Siegler and his colleague Rita Economos of Southern Methodist University discovered this heat source using a new method that uses microwaves to measure temperatures below the surface. They used data from China’s Chang’E 1 and 2 lunar orbiters, as well as Lunar Prospector (Lunar Prospector was an American-made exploration probe…) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a NASA space probe that was put into…) from NASA.
They discovered an area 50 kilometers in diameter (In a circle or a sphere, the diameter is a line segment passing through the center…) where the temperature (Temperature is a physical quantity measured using a thermometer and…) is about 10 degrees Celsius higher than that of the surroundings. This region is located under a spot 20 km in diameter on the surface, rich in silicon (Silicon is a chemical element of the family of crystallogens, symbol Si…) and presumed to be a collapsed volcanic crater (For the crater of volcanic origin, see Volcanic crater For the crater of origin…)
“What we found is a 50 km wide batholith; a batholith is a type of volcanic rock that forms when lava rises through the crust without erupting to the surface,” Economos explains. “El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite, California are examples of similar granitic rocks that have emerged to the surface.”
Stephen M. Elardo, a geochemist at the University of Florida not involved in the study, finds the findings “incredibly interesting.” Granite is extremely common on Earth, but not elsewhere in the solar system (The solar system is a planetary system composed of a star, the…). “If the findings of Siegler and his colleagues are confirmed, this could be essential for understanding the inner workings of other rocky bodies in the solar system.”
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