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    New Findings Suggest Moon may have Less Water than Previously Thought

    September 20, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Graph with colored patches showings the extent of PSRs 3.3 billion years ago (red), 2.1 billion years ago (green) and close to present-day (blue) with current topography
    Courtesy of Schörghofer/Rufu The scientists used AstroGeo22 and LOLA height measurements to calculate the age of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions near its poles. Colored patches show the extent of PSRs 3.3 billion years ago (red), 2.1 billion years ago (green) and close to present-day (blue) with current topography. These findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high.

    Moon’s permanently shadowed regions are younger than previously estimated. A team including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Raluca Rufu recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice...

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    Moon Glows Brighter than Sun in Images from NASA’s Fermi

    August 18, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    These images show the steadily improving view of the Moon’s gamma-ray glow from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Each 5-by-5-degree image is centered on the Moon and shows gamma rays with energies above 31 million electron volts, or tens of millions of times that of visible light. At these energies, the Moon is actually brighter than the Sun. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays. This image sequence shows how longer exposure, ranging from two to 128 months (10.7 years), improved the view.
    Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

    If our eyes could see high-energy radiation called gamma rays, the Moon would appear brighter than the Sun! That’s how NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has seen our neighbor in space for the past decade...

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    The True Power of the Solar Wind

    June 13, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Particles from the sun are constantly hitting the surface of mercury. Credit: NASA, montage: TU Wien

    Particles from the sun are constantly hitting the surface of mercury. Credit: NASA, montage: TU Wien

    The planets and moons of our solar system are continuously being bombarded by particles hurled away from the sun. On Earth this has hardly any effect, apart from the fascinating northern lights, because the dense atmosphere and the magnetic field of the Earth protect us from these solar wind particles. But on the Moon or on Mercury things are different: There, the uppermost layer of rock is gradually eroded by the impact of sun particles.

    New results of the TU Wien now show that previous models of this process are incomplete. The effects of solar wind bombardment are in some cases much more drastic than previously thought...

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    Thank the Moon for Earth’s Lengthening Day

    June 7, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    During its flight to Jupiter in 1992, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft returned images of the Earth and Moon. Separate images were combined to generate this view. NASA/JPL/USGS

    During its flight to Jupiter in 1992, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft returned images of the Earth and Moon. Separate images were combined to generate this view. NASA/JPL/USGS

    For anyone who has ever wished there were more hours in the day, geoscientists have some good news: Days on Earth are getting longer. A new study that reconstructs the deep history of our planet’s relationship to the moon shows that 1.4 billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted just over 18 hours. This is at least in part because the moon was closer and changed the way Earth spun around its axis.

    “As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out,” explains Stephen Meyers, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the stud...

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