A mystery swirls on the moon

A swirl of cream in a cup of hot chocolate. In the form of tadpole. Striking. The diffuse appearance of abstract airbrush paintings. These are all phrases that NASA has used to describe a famous lunar swirl called Reiner Gamma, one of the mysterious and exotic series of formations observed on the surface of the moon.

But there is no stranger with an airbrush over there. Scientists already knew that lunar vortices coincided with locally high magnetic fields. A new study conducted by a team from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, reveals a deeper understanding, related to volcanism, of obsessive surface features.

Researchers suspect that magnetic anomalies deflect solar winds that can darken the lunar soil, giving us the ethereal and tattooed vortices. The question is what causes these powerful magnetic fields.

Scientists have created mathematical models for geological features indicating the presence of narrow magnetic objects near the lunar surface where the eddies are located. This coincides with the shape of lava tubes and dikes.

As calm as the moon seems now, it had a noisy volcanic past.

Scientists have discovered that some of the lunar rocks reported by the Apollo missions were magnetic. Experiments have shown that these rocks become very magnetic when heated at extreme temperatures in an oxygen-free environment.

Rutgers says that magnetism is due to the fact that minerals decompose and release metallic iron. "If there is a sufficiently strong magnetic field nearby, the newly formed iron will become magnetized in the direction of this field," notes the University.

The researchers combined that knowledge of the moon's rocks with a study published last year that revealed that the now-lost magnetic field of the moon had lasted over a billion years as scientists previously thought.

This means that lava tubes and dikes formed by volcanic activity on the moon could have become very magnetic as they cooled down. We now have a good potential explanation for these quaint lunar whirlpools.

"No one has thought of this reaction in terms of explaining these exceptionally strong magnetic features on the moon," said Sonia Tikoo, co-author of the study at Rutgers. "This was the last piece of the understanding puzzle of magnetism that underlies these lunar whirlpools."

Moving on to the next step in exploring these ideas would require a more in-depth examination of lunar vortices.

Last year, NASA envisioned a concept for an ambitious captive CubeSat mission that would swing a mini-satellite near the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, Tikoo is part of a committee that proposes to send a lunar rover to study the eddies.

The researchers published their findings in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

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