The Earth rising over the Moon's surface, as seen by the Apollo 8 mission. Credit: NASA
Wondering why a new research team says the Earth and the Moon is 60 million years older than previously believed? Well, it’s a gas. It has to do with the proportion of different gas types that have stuck around since the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
Since Earth had no solid surface at the time, traditional geology doesn’t really work — there’s no rock layers to examine, for example. So while the geologists caution we’ll likely never know for sure when the Earth came together, a new dating method for the gases show it was earlier than believed, they said.
To back up a step, the leading theory for how the Moon formed is that a Mars-sized object smashed into our planet, created a chain of debris, and over a long time gradually came together and formed the Moon. There’s been a flurry of news on this event in recent days. Different science groups have found evidence of the crash in Earth and Moon materials, and said it could explain why the Moon’s far side is so rugged compared to the near side.
For this study, Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty (who are both geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France) examined xenon gas in quartz found in Australia (previously believed to be 2.7 billion years old) and South Africa (3.4 billion years old).
64% illuminated waning gibbous Moon on August 26, 2013. Credit and copyright: Themagster3 on Flickr.
“Recalibrating dating techniques using the ancient gas allowed them to refine the estimate of when the Earth began to form,” stated the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California, where this was presented today (June 10). “This allows them to calculate that the Moon-forming impact is around 60 million years (+/- 20 m. y.) older than had been thought.”
This also affects calculations concerning when the Earth’s atmosphere formed. Since the atmosphere could not have stuck around after the big crash, this means that the previous estimate of 100 million years after the solar system’s formation wouldn’t work. So if the Earth and the Moon are 60 million years older, the Earth’s atmosphere formed about 40 million years after the solar system’s formation.
It’ll be interesting to see if other scientists agree with the analysis.
Composite image of the far side of the moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009. Credit: NASA
In these days of daily image releases from Saturn, Mars, the Moon and other spots in the universe, it’s hard to remember just how exciting it was back in the 1950s and 1960s when a few images trickled out to the world at the time. Perhaps one of the biggest early surprises was how jagged and cragged the back side of the moon looked. Where were the lunar “seas” that we are familiar with on the Earth-facing side of the moon?
About 55 years after the first Soviet images of the farside were sent to Earth, a team of researchers led by graduate astrophysics student Arpita Roy (at Penn State University) may have an explanation.
They say it’s due to the violent way that the Moon formed — likely after a Mars-sized object collided with our Earth, creating a sea of debris that gradually coalseced into the Moon we see today. The huge crash and gathering together heated up both our planet and the Moon, but the Moon got cooler first because it was smaller.
Since the Earth was still hot — radiating at more than 2,500 degrees Celsius (4,500 degrees Fahrenheit) — and the Moon very close to the planet, the heat of the Earth had quite the effect. The far side of the Moon cooled down while the near side remained very hot.
“This gradient was important for crustal formation on the moon. The moon’s crust has high concentrations of aluminum and calcium, elements that are very hard to vaporize,” Penn State stated.
Credit-Scott Chapman
Calcium and aluminum are the first elements that “snow out” as rock vapor cools, and they would have remained in the atmosphere on the Moon’s far side. (The near side was too hot.)
“Thousands to millions of years later, these elements combined with silicates in the Moon’s mantle to form plagioclase feldspars, which eventually moved to the surface and formed the Moon’s crust,” Penn State added. “The farside crust had more of these minerals and is thicker.”
The seas themselves were formed after huge meteors crashed into the Moon’s Earth-facing side, rupturing the crust and letting the basaltic lava beneath burst forth. The crust on the far side was too thick for the meteors to penetrate, in most cases, leaving the rugged surface we are familiar with today.
Aurorae were once believed to be warring clans of spirit soldiers, the skyward ghosts of virgin women, or the glow of fires burning inside celestial caves. Today we know they’re caused by ions in the atmosphere getting zapped by charged solar particles caught up in Earth’s magnetic field. But the knowledge of what creates aurorae doesn’t make their shimmering dance any less beautiful for those lucky enough to see them. I’ve personally never witnessed an aurora, but photographer Ole Salomonsen has — and he’s created yet another gorgeous time-lapse of the northern lights over his native Scandinavia to share their beauty with the world.
Rising Milky Way above Marina Bay Sands in Singapore on April 10, 2014. Credit and copyright: Justin Ng.
We feature A LOT of astrophotos here on Universe Today, and we get many comments about them, too — with some people saying they could NEVER take photos of the night sky because they live in cities, or are too close to street or yard lights or other causes of light pollution.
Now, award-winning astrophotographer Justin Ng from Singapore has created a tutorial for how to photograph the night sky, even in light-polluted area.
“This tutorial shows you how I photograph the Milky Way that’s obscured by the extreme light pollution in Singapore, using photography equipments that you may already have and a workflow that probably works on most versions of Photoshop,” Justin writes, adding that the type of photo processing he uses in Photoshop can be achieved without purchasing additional plugins.
Justin says that taking pictures of the night sky is a way you can “do your part to promote public awareness of astronomy and the importance of preserving the beauty of our night skies through your images. And I am going to show you how you can do just that using photography equipment that you may already have and a workflow that probably works in most versions of Photoshop.”
For this tutorial, you will need some previous knowledge about basic photography and post-processing.
Still from the first Vine video from space showing the Sun never setting on the International Space Station. Video taken in June 2014. Credit: Reid Wiseman/Vine
Isn’t there something so soothing about watching the Sun go around and around in this short video? This is the first Vine video from space. Vine is a social website that publishes short videos (around six seconds), and it’s used to great illustration in this message beamed from the International Space Station.
Going around Earth usually takes the space station around 90 minutes, but NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman explained that at this time of year, it is flying parallel with the “terminator line” — the location where the Sun rises or sets on Earth.
This left the space station in 24-hour sunlight, providing some great marathon space station watching for those people wanting to wave at the guys from the ground. According to Universe Today writer Bob King, the marathon wraps up tomorrow, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the space station from your location.
We record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Monday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch here on Universe Today or from the Astronomy Cast Google+ page.
Goodbye Moon. Every year, the Moon slips a few centimeters away from us, slowing down our day. Why is the Moon drifting away from us, and how long will it take before the Earth and the Moon are tidally locked to each other?
We had a good run, us and the Moon. Grab your special edition NASA space tissues because today we’re embarking on a tale of orbital companionship, childhood sweethearts and heartache.
You could say we came from the same part of town. A long time ago the Mars-sized object Theia, collided with the Earth and the Moon was formed out of the debris from the collision.
We grew up together. Counting from the very beginning, this relationship has lasted for 4.5 billion years. We had some good times. Some bad times. Gravitationally linked, arm in arm, inside our solar family sedan traversing the galaxy.
But now, tragedy. The Moon, OUR Moon, is moving on to brighter horizons. We used to be much closer when we were younger and time seemed to fly by much faster. In fact, 620 million years ago, a day was only 21 hours long. Now they’ve dragged out to 24 hours and they’re just getting longer, and the Moon is already at a average distance of 384,400 km. It almost feels too far away.
If we think back far enough to when we were kids, there was a time when a day was just 2 – 3 hours long, and the Moon was much closer. It seemed like we did everything together back then. But just like people, massive hunks of rock and materials flying through space change, and their relationships change as well.
Our therapist told us it wasn’t a good idea to get caught up on minutiae, but we’ve done some sciencing using the retroreflector experiments placed by Apollo astronauts, and it looks as though the Moon has always had one foot out the door.
Today it’s drifting away at 1-2 cm/year. Such heartache! We just thought it seemed like the days were longer, but it’s not just an emotional effect of seeing our longtime friend leaving us, there’s a real physical change happening. Our days are getting 1/500th of a second longer every century.
I can’t help but blame myself. If only we knew why. Did the Moon find someone new? Someone more attractive? Was it that trollop Venus, the hottest planet in the whole solar system? It’s really just a natural progression. It’s nature. It’s gravity and tidal forces.
And no, that’s not a metaphor. The Earth and the Moon pull at each other with their gravity. Their shapes get distorted and the pull of this tidal force creates a bulge. The Earth has a bulge facing towards the Moon, and the Moon has a more significant bulge towards the Earth.
A series of photos combined to show the rise of the July 22, 2013 ‘super’ full moon over the Rocky Mountains, shot near Vail, Colorado, at 10,000ft above sea level in the White River National Forest. Moon images are approximately 200 seconds apart. Credit and copyright: Cory Schmitz
These bulges act like handles for gravity, which slows down their rotation. The process allowed the Earth’s gravity to slow the Moon to a stop billions of years ago. The Moon is still working on the Earth to change its ways, but it’ll be a long time before we become tidally locked to the Moon.
This slowing rotation means energy is lost by the Earth. This energy is transferred to the Moon which is speeding up, and as we’ve talked about in previous episodes the faster something orbits, the further and further it’s becomes from the object it’s orbiting.
Will it ever end? We’re so attached, it seems like it’ll take forever to figure out who’s stuff belongs to who and who gets the dog. Fear not, there is an end in sight. 50 billion years from now, 45 billion years after the Sun has grown weary of our shenanigans and become a red giant, when the days have slowed to be 45 hours long, the Moon will consider itself all moved into its brand new apartment ready to start its new life.
What about the neighbors down the street? How are the other orbital relationships faring. I know there’s a lot of poly-moon-amory taking place out there in the Solar System. We’re not the only ones with Moons tidally locked. There’s Phobos and Deimos to Mars, many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are, and Pluto and Charon are even tidally locked to each other, forever. Now’s that’s real commitment. So, in the end. The lesson here is people and planets change. The Moon just needs its space, but it still wants to be friends.
What do you think? If you were writing a space opera about the Earth and the Moon break-up, what was it that finally came between them? Tell us in the comments below.
Artist's conception of how the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) beams information from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
What’s the first thing you would say to Earth if you were sending a message from space? Well, the old computer expression “Hello, World!” seems apt. That in fact was the content of the video message sent by laser from an experiment on the International Space Station that aims to speed up communications in space.
Laser could change communications with spacecraft forever. For half a century we’ve been used to puttering around with radio waves, receiving a few bits of information at a time, which makes transmitting images and videos from distant planets an exercise of patience.
Enter the OPALS (Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science) payload, which transmitted the video (which you can watch above) at a maximum of 50 megabits per second — the standard speed for many home Internet connections. The testbed technology could speed up comms about 10 to 1,000 times faster than traditional radio, which would definitely get science information to the ground faster. The tradeoff is you have to be extremely precise.
“Because the space station orbits Earth at 17,500 mph [28,200 km/h], transmitting data from the space station to Earth requires extremely precise targeting,” NASA stated. “The process can be equated to a person aiming a laser pointer at the end of a human hair 30 feet away and keeping it there while walking.”
OPALS did this by communicating with a laser beacon at the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California. The transmission took 148 seconds, and the video message itself only took 3.5 seconds for each copy to come to Earth — compared with 10 minutes under traditional methods!
Welcome, come in to the 357th Carnival of Space! The carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. I’m Susie Murph, part of the team at Universe Today and now, on to this week’s stories!
We’re going to start off with a double blast from the past, courtesy of CosmoQuest! This week, they’re featuring Stuart Robbins’s blog post from January 13, 2012, titled “Perspective on the Apollo 15 Landing Site.” He explores the region of the Moon that is the current home of the MoonMappers images that YOU are still mapping and exploring today – the Apollo 15 landing site area. It’s a neat place and we can study a lot of things there. Due to a quirk of optics and angles, you can even imagine you’re flying towards it.
Next, we stay with Cosmoquest’s Moon Mappers as they highlight the interesting discovery that the groundbreaking Soviet Lunakhod 2 lunar rover traveled farther than earlier estimated on it’s mission in 1972. Visit MoonMappers at Cosmoquest for more great stories!
Moving through history, we travel over to io9’s Space blog for a history of the American Space Shuttle disasters is a grim reminder of the danger of space travel. Just released is Major Malfunction, a documentary on the two Shuttle catastrophes. Major malfunction is an understatement for the destruction of Space Shuttle Challenger moments after launch in 1986, and the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia during re-entry in 2003.
Next at io9, we visit Mars to view the magnificent Draa, which are ancient landforms created from waves of sand. Check out the article and it’s images here.
Now we’ll jump over for some gorgeous views from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory! One of their new images is a glorious view of the Whirlpool spiral galaxy which radiates with fantastic points of x-ray light. These image is breath-taking!
Want more gorgeous images? Visit Brownspaceman.com to see his discussion of the Tulip Nebula, which is a composite image which also maps the emissions from this incredible nebula.
The NextBigFuture Blog lives up to it’s name by bringing us two interesting stories from Elon Musk and his company SpaceX. First, he points out that the key is reusability. Musk said the crewed Dragon is designed to land softly back on Earth and be rapidly turned around for another flight — possibly on the same day. Spacex is aiming for 10 flights without any significant refurbishment for the Dragon v2. The thing that will have to be refurbished is the main heat shield. Further improved heat shield materials [later versions of PICA-X] would mean Spacex could aim for 100 reusable flights.
Finally, we return to Universe Today for some interesting potential missions. First, the B612 Foundation’s privately-funded Sentinel mission, once launched and placed in orbit around the Sun in 2018, will hunt for near-Earth asteroids down to about 140 meters in size using the most advanced infrared imaging technology, without government red tape to hamper the mission. Next, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts office announced a dozen far-flung drawing-board proposals that have received $100,000 in Phase 1 funding for the next 9-12 months, one of which is a balloon for exploring Titan. We’re looking forward to hearing about these projects and many others in the coming years.
That’s it for this week’s Carnival! See you all next time!
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.
The Moon sets above the Continental Divide in Colorado from 86,000 feet. Taken June 27, 2013 on a meteorological balloon launched from Boulder, Colorado. Credit and copyright: Patrick Cullis.
What physical evidence exists of a huge collision that formed our Moon and nearly blew the Earth apart, about 4.5 billion years ago? This is the leading theory for how the Moon came to be, but given it happened so long ago the physical evidence is scarce.
Readers may recall the story from last week talking about how oxygen in Moon rocks shows evidence of this crash. This week, there’s a new study from the same conference that focuses on the other side of the puzzle piece: what can we see on planet Earth? Turns out there might be a “signal” showing us the way.
As the theory goes, the colliding body — which some researchers call “Theia” — would have created a cloud of fragments surrounding our planet that eventually coalesced into the Moon.
The new research says that evidence of this collision would have showed up in the mantle, a layer of the Earth’s interior, and could explain a puzzling difference in isotopes (types) of certain elements that was known before.
“The energy released by the impact between the Earth and Theia would have been huge, certainly enough to melt the whole planet,” stated research lead Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor at Harvard University.
Layers of the Earth
“But we believe that the impact energy was not evenly distributed throughout the ancient Earth. This means that a major part of the impacted hemisphere would probably have been completely vaporized, but the opposite hemisphere would have been partly shielded, and would not have undergone complete melting.”
The team said that the impact did not completely stir the mantle, which would explain why the ratio of isotopes of helium and nitrogen inside the shallow part of the mantle is much higher than the deep mantle.
They also analyzed two isotopes of xenon. Scientists know already that the material on the surface has a lower isotope ratio to what is inside, but what is new is comparing these isotopes pointed to an age of the collision: about 100 million years after the Earth formed.
The research was presented today at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California.
