: A global team of scientists has discovered that 2 billion years ago, lava from volcanoes on the moon was boiling and spreading on its surface.
The discovery came from a detailed analysis of rocks and soil brought from the moon by the Chinese space mission “Chang E5” in December last year, which has challenged our previous ideas about the origin and evolution of the moon.
“Chang E5” collected these samples from a lunar site where volcanoes existed billions of years ago. The specimens weigh about two kilograms and are owned by China, although some of them were provided for global research.
Also read: Chinese spacecraft returns to Earth safely after taking samples from the moon
Astronomers agree that about 4.5 billion years ago, a small planet collided with our Earth, which was then in a very hot and completely molten state.
As a result of this collision, part of the molten earth separated and began to cool as it orbited the earth. Today we know this part of the earth as the “moon”.
Because the moon is 81 times smaller and 4 times smaller than Earth, experts believe that the moon began to cool faster as it separated from the earth.
In the next one billion years, about three and a half billion years before today, the moon had cooled so much that the volcanic eruptions there had stopped completely.
However, specimens from the moon clearly show traces of volcanic activity, but the rocks and pebbles are only two billion years old.
This means that the volcanoes on the moon were still active one and a half billion years later than we currently imagine, and the lava was erupting.
Why has the moon been so hot internally for so long? What is the reason that the volcanic process continued there for two and a half billion years? At the moment we do not have a solid and reliable answer to these questions.
It seems that our current theories about the origin and evolution of not only the moon but also the earth and the entire solar system have to undergo changes in the light of this discovery.
Note: Details of this research have been published in the latest issue of the research journal “Science”.
