New Research Suggests The Moon Has A Very Thin And Wispy Atmosphere That Developed Due To Space Rocks Battering The Surface
Our planet’s moon has a long history of violence, which scientists recently realized has contributed to the development of a very thin and wispy atmosphere called an exosphere.
For many years, researchers have puzzled over the cause of the fragile lunar atmosphere. Now, new research has indicated that the exosphere’s existence is due to space rocks battering the moon.
Such an assault is called “impact vaporization,” a phenomenon that occurs when impacts stir up lunar soil, vaporizing materials that escape to space or stay hanging over the moon.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Chicago believe this process has renewed and sustained the moon’s atmosphere for billions of years.
“We give a definitive answer that meteorite impact vaporization is the dominant process that creates the lunar atmosphere,” Nicole Nie, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at MIT, said.
“The moon is close to 4.5 billion years old, and through that time, the surface has been continuously bombarded by meteorites. We show that eventually, a thin atmosphere reaches a steady state because it’s being continuously replenished by small impacts all over the moon.”
The moon contains a lot of pits and scars that serve as a reminder of how space rocks have struck its surface throughout its entire history. During the early years of the moon’s life, the solar system was way more chaotic and violent.
As a result, the lunar surface was often pummeled with massive meteorites. Over time, collisions between solar system bodies wore down many larger space rocks.
So, as the moon got older, the bombardment continued, but the rocks had diminished to space particles called “micrometeoroids” that were smaller than a grain of sand.
dimazel – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
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Although the impacts were less severe, they still allowed impact vaporization to take place and keep replenishing the exosphere.
In 2013, NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) began investigating the moon’s thin atmosphere, its surface conditions, and how lunar dust was affected by environmental influences.
That was when scientists started to suspect that the assault of space rocks was responsible for generating the exosphere.
The revelation led them to explore two regeneration processes—impact vaporization and “ion sputtering.” The second one occurs when the solar wind, high-energy charged particles from the sun, comes into contact with the lunar surface and transfers energy to atoms. The atoms are also launched into the exosphere.
Based on the data from LADEE, it seemed that both of the processes were playing a role in maintaining the exosphere.
“For instance, it showed that during meteorite showers, you see more atoms in the atmosphere, meaning impacts have an effect,” Nie said. “But it also showed that when the moon is shielded from the sun, such as during an eclipse, there are also changes in the atmosphere’s atoms, meaning that the sun also has an impact. So, the results were not clear or quantitative.”
To figure out which process is more responsible for the moon’s atmosphere, Nie and colleagues studied 10 samples of lunar soil.
They isolated the elements potassium and rubidium in the samples. They predicted that these lighter isotopes were more likely to be suspended in the exosphere.
If most of the atoms stay in the atmosphere, impact vaporization will be the primary process. If many atoms were launched into space, ion sputtering would be behind that. The team found that impact vaporization was the dominant process.
Overall, 70 percent of the exosphere was generated by meteorite strikes and impact vaporization, while 30 percent was due to solar winds and ion sputtering.
The study was published in Science Advances.
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