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There is something very strange and very dense under the surface of the moon South-Aitken Pole Basin, a new research suggests.
This massive and unexpected blob could represent the buried remains of an asteroid that crashed to the surface of the moon and formed this basin in the first place. This new hypothesis is based on data from NASA Gravity and Interior Recovery Laboratory (GRAIL) and Moon recognition orbiter missions. When scientists combined the two types of data, they found a gap between the topography of the surface and the gravitational tug of the moon.
"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground," wrote lead author Peter B. James, a geoscientist at Baylor University in Texas. . said in a statement. "It's about how much unexpected mass we've detected."
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The research supported two key missions from NASA's moon exploration portfolio. The GRAIL mission included two spacecraft, which spent more than a year orbiting the moon, each of them using the other to map the gravitational tug of the moon. the Moon recognition orbiter spent nearly 10 years at work and made billions of measurements of the precise height of the moon's surface.
With regard to the South-Aitken Pole Basin, the topography is particularly striking. It is a huge crater that extends 2,000 kilometers across the moon, making it the largest crater planetary scientists know so far. As its name suggests, it is also located near the south pole of the moon, and experts believe that it was created perhaps 4 billion years ago.
Thus, when the team found an increase in the tugging of the Moon aligned with the vicinity of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, scientists wondered if the anomaly could go directly back to the crater itself. "One of the explanations for this extra mass is that the metal of the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the mantle of the moon," said James.
Another possible explanation for the anomaly, the researchers wrote, is that the region is rich in oxides, which would probably have formed when the old magma of the moon would have cooled and solidified.
However, it is formed, the fact that the mass anomaly is still so important and it seems to be located about 300 km deep also offers scientists a fascinating idea: These facts suggest that the interior of the moon can not be so gooey; If they were, the gravity of the moon would attract the massive patch in the lunar center.
The research is described in a document published April 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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