There is an enormous encrusted mass in the center of the moon, and astronomers do not know what it is.

Here is something you may not know about the moon: Earth's best friend, Earth's best friend, is also the site of one of the largest known impact craters of the world. our solar system. Billions of years ago, something caused a giant hole on the moon and astronomers come to discover that there is something big, very big, buried under the surface.

According to a research published in the journal "

Geophysical Research Letters, "The lunar basin of the South Aitken Pole hides an estimated mass of 4.8 billion pounds (4,800,000,000,000,000,000 pounds, all written).

"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That's about the unexpected mass we've detected,"

the author Peter B. James said in a statement

.

Baylor's researchers used various sets of data collected by spacecraft that measure gravity around the moon, and compared them to maps and images of the moon's surface. As a result, they found a dense metallic mass that was falling on the ground of the basin.

So what is it? James and his team assume that it could be metal encrusted in the lunar mantle following the impact of asteroids that caused the crater there are about 4 billion. years. If this is true, it could be a time machine – and a gold mine – for scientists who study the history of the world. ;universe. All this metal, and essentially the entire area surrounding the mass and crater, could tell them a lot about how the asteroid impact has occurred and about the state of the earth. solar system at the time.

"[The basin is] One of the best natural laboratories for studying catastrophic events, an ancient process that has shaped all the planets and rocky moons we see today, "said James.

Unfortunately, the crater – and the mysterious substance below – are not visible to ordinary humans related to the Earth, since they are literally at the other end of the moon.