Chinese lunar exploration reveals gel-like substance

China said it found a strange gel-like substance on the surface of the moon, reports the government newspaper People's Daily.

"The Yutu-2 rover, which is part of the Chinese Chang-e-4 mission, has discovered an unusually colorful" gel-like "substance during its exploration activities away from the moon, " the tweeted newspaper.

The substance was found by a rover on a crater on July 25 during the eighth day of an exploration mission.

Mahesh Anand, a global scientist at the Open University in the UK, told Newsweek that the material could be a type of glass.

"The fact that it was observed associated with a small crater of impact, this discovery could be extremely exciting, as it would indicate that a very different material could simply hide under the upper surface," he said. did he declare. "It would become even more important if these materials were to have an interaction with ice-water (because the possibility of an existence of ice water in the few meters the highest in the southern polar lunar region is based on recent detection data). "

Walter Freeman, a physicist at Syracuse University, added, "There is a bit of precedent in this regard on Earth: on the site where the first nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, there is a glassy mineral called" trinitite "formed by the heat of the explosion, he says. "The same thing is happening around meteorite impacts here."