Since the discovery of lunar water in 2008 after India’s Chandrayaan-1 deployed its NASA-lent instrument called the Moon Mineralogical Mapper, astrophysicists and planetary geologists have been puzzling over where the water came from, due to the Moon s extreme arid climate and lack of any atmosphere.
Credit: E. Masongsong, UCLA EPSS, NASA GSFC SVS
Early theories postulated that it might have hitchhiked onto the surface inside water-carrying asteroids or from solar winds bombarding the Moon with ionized molecules that later formed H2O. However, in a new research paper recently published in the online journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of international scientists believe all that extra moisture just might have originated from the Earth’s own magnetosphere.
El origen de «Oumuamua» divide a la comunidad científica
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Descubren puente de agua entre la Tierra y la Luna que podría explicar su humedad
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Water is far more prevalent in space than astronomers first thought, from the of Mars to Jupiter s moons and Saturn s rings, comets, asteroids and Pluto; it has even been detected in clouds far beyond our solar system. It was previously assumed that water was incorporated into these objects during the formation of the solar system, but there is growing evidence that water in space is far more dynamic. Though the solar wind is a likely source for lunar surface water, computer models predict that up to half of it should evaporate and disappear at high-latitude regions during the approximately three days of the full moon when it passes within Earth s magnetosphere.
La magnetósfera de la Tierra podría crear un puente de agua que explicaría la humedad en la Luna: estudio
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