Astronomer Offers Theory Into 400-Year-Old Lunar Mystery

webdoodle writes "An astronomer at Columbia University thinks he has solved a 400-year-old mystery: the origin of strange optical flashes seen on the moon's surface. These spots, called 'Transient Lunar Phenomenon' (TLP) by the astronomy community, have confused moon-gazers since the time of ancient scientists. Arlin Crotts now thinks that TLPs are something called 'outgassing', a process where trapped gasses escape to the lunar atmosphere. 'To arrive at his theory, Crotts correlated TLPs with known gas outbursts from the lunar surface as seen by several spacecraft, particularly NASA's Apollo 15 mission in 1971 and the robotic Lunar Prospector in 1998. What he discovered was a remarkable similarity in the pattern of outgassing event locations recorded by spacecraft across the face of the moon and reported TLP sites.'"

Comments

I'm more curious ...

[ScrewMaster]

if that pepperoni pizza I just consumed can cause outgassing events. My girlfriend says so, but I believe she is mistaken.

Re:I'm more curious ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one way to tell for sure. Ask an astronaut if there are any optical flashes coming off of your ass.

Re:I'm more curious ...

[Null Nihils]

My ROOMMATE says so, but I believe HE is mistaken.

Fixed that for you.

Re:I'm more curious ...

[datapharmer]

My PARENTS says so, but THEY ARE mistaken.

Fixed that for you.

Re:I'm more curious ...

[vigmeister]

My PARENTS says so, but THEY ARE upstairs on the ground floor. Cheers!
--
Vig

Re:I'm more curious ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plural subject gets a plural verb! Goddamn Neanderthals...

Re:I'm more curious ...

[Anonymous Coward]

My PARENTS SAY so, but THEY ARE upstairs on the ground floor.

Anonymous basement grammar nazi

It's UFO's

[guruevi]

the origin of strange optical flashes seen on the moon's surface

Nothing for you to see here, please move along...

Apparently the moon is gaseous. And now that I exhausted all the gas and nothing to see jokes, please continue with euhm... more intelligent conversation.

Re:It's UFO's

[Whiteox]

Yeah! Gaseous! It's probably a big balloon full of CO2.

That's Obscene!

[BlackGriffen]

The man in the moon is not only farting in our general direction, he's flashing us at the same time, too!

Re:That's Obscene!

[hitest]

Astronomers have tracked FLEs for decades (Flatulent Lunar Events).

Re:That's Obscene!

[VJ42]

It's called Mooning for a reason.

Oh come on..

[anilg]

The moon did say 'Excuse me'!

Re:Oh come on..

[poopdeville]

No, it just laughed and did it again more loudly.

Re:Oh come on..

[xENoLocO]

While singing about cheeseburgers...

Why do you overlook the obvious answer?

[jollyreaper]

It's an alien space traveler. He crashed on the moon, lost just about everything, no subspace radio, no towel, all he's got is a shiny bit of the craft he's been using as a signal mirror for the past 400 years and we're too damn busy to answer him back! Better hope this doesn't get back to the Guide, our description might be revised to "mostly oblivious."

Re:Why do you overlook the obvious answer?

[tehshen]

I guess Itchy had the right idea...

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just Ignignokt and Err. No need to be alarmed.

Re:Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just Ignignokt and Err. No need to be alarmed.

Fuck you, terrorist. If that's the case, there's plenty of reason to be alarmed.

Uh, "New"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but this has already been suggested, along with a few other possibilities.

Can Slashdot editors fire-up Google before they post old theories as new ones? Or is that too much to ask?

Re:Uh, "New"?

[HaloMan]

>Can Slashdot editors fire-up Google before they post old theories as new ones?

You're new here, aren't you?

Uhm.. A question?

[tetrahedrassface]

Sometimes the visible isn't so?

Article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Moon farts.

(disclaimer: I didn't RTFA)

You know what would be even funnier

[dubbayu_d_40]

...if the poster were serious. Excuse me while I thing an outgassing... Hmm, Ahhhhhh

No it's a likely a Teaser.

[infonography]

"A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them."

"Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

"Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really."

Or it's The Mind Parasites as in Colin Wilson [mention this twice in one thats odd]

Radon?

[calidoscope]

Problem with blaming the outgassing on Radon is that the half life is only a couple of days. OTOH, all the helium emitted as alpha particles as part of the decay chain doesn't decay and may make up a good portion of the gas.

Re:Radon?

[Mothinator]

Yes, but radon is a decay product of uranium, which is much longer lived. I don't know if there is a lot of uranium on the moon, but I know the earth produces a lot of radon.

It tends to collect in basements and give people cancer.

Re:Radon?

[vigmeister]

ATI produces a lot of radeon.
It tends to collect in parents' basements There. Fixed that for you :)

Cheers!

Re:Radon?

[DerekLyons]

AIUI, the moon is seriously deficient in the heavier elements - one of the side effects of being formed from the Earth's crust.

Re:Radon?

[Whiteox]

That's interesting, cause if the moon is full of Helium, then that's why it's so light!

Hey! It makes sense to me!......

Re:Radon?

[yada21]

Uranium is a heavy element, and the Earth's crust has plenty of it. Or perhaps Uranium mines are much deeper than I thought.

Step 2

[Tablizer]

Now astronomers are looking for the Burrito Cluster Nebula predicted by these events.

Re:Step 2

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to use Professor Farnsworth's Smell-O-Scope for this.

Tags

[Umbral Blot]

Currently this article is tagged "things" (or at least it was when I viewed it). That may be the tag that conveys the least possible amount of information. Sorry to be off-topic, but the absurdity of the tag seems to be saying something either about the tagging system or the people who use it. (Of course I wouldn't say that the tag "science" on an article in the science section is much more useful.)

Re:Tags

[WalterGR]

...this article is tagged "things" (or at least it was when I viewed it). That may be the tag that conveys the least possible amount of information.

That's because the summary contains a typo that reads "things." Certainly the "typo" tag would be more informative, but whatever. Welcome to folksonomies. Emphasis mine:

Arlin Crotts now things that TLPs are something called 'outgassing'...

Re:Tags

[Anonymous Coward]

Arlin Crotts now things that TLPs are something called 'outgassing',

Bitch please...

[island_tux]

They are not really expecting us to believe in this "Gass crap again". For fuck sake, come up with some other lame excuse...

Please. There is proper technical name for it.

[zymano]

Moon Farts.

Vid of meteor hitting moon.

[zymano]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_luna rsporadic.htm

Re:Vid of meteor hitting moon.

[Lavene]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_luna rsporadic.htm Except that the flash from such objects are too brief compared to the 'common' TLP it seems. From the above mentioned article:

"The duration of the fireball was only four-tenths of a second," says Cooke

Re:Tags - things and stuff.

[fahrbot-bot]

Currently this article is tagged "things"...

The word "stuff" was thought to be too specific.

What a coincidence!

[GodfatherofSoul]

I outgas through a crack in MY moon!

Re:Please. There is proper technical name for it.

[Dunbal]

And I thought cow farts caused global warming...

Uranium?

[mosb1000]

Maybe they should prospect for lunar uranium locations that have a lot of out-gassings. It wouldn't solve the water problem, but it would provide basically unlimited electrical or thermal power.

Re:Uranium?

[Loke the Dog]

Why would there be uranium there?

Besides, getting uranium to the moon isnt the most difficult part of nuclear power on the moon...

Re:Uranium?

[mosb1000]

Radon is a product of Uranium 238 decay:

238U (4.5 x 109 yr), 234Th (24.1 days), 234Pa (1.18 min), 234U (250,000 yr), 230Th (75,000 yr), 226Ra (1,600 yr), 222Rn (3.82 days), 218Po (3.1 min), 214Pb (26.8 min), 214Bi (19.7 min), 214Po (164 µs), 210Pb (22.3 yr), 210Bi (5.01 days), 210Po (138 days), 206Pb (stable)

Radon is a noble gas, unlike all the other elements in this decay sequence. Since there is no groundwater on the moon to move things around, the evolution of radon gas indicates the presence of Uranium.

"getting uranium to the moon isnt the most difficult part of nuclear power on the moon"

That depends on how much power you want to generate. If we really intend to colonize the moon, one would assume that we would want to use lunar resources to construct larger structures, spacecraft, etc. . . The apparent lack of coal or graphite on the moon means that it would be difficult to extract metals through traditional means. Electro-refining may be an alternative, but would require large amounts of electricity.

Uranium is very heavy (uranium is the most dense naturally occurring element in its pure form). Launching significant quantities of uranium to the moon would be expensive, and politically impossible due to the chance of accidental environmental releases. Also, uranium could make up a large portion of the weight of a Nuclear reactor on the moon, because of the reduced need for shielding and containment (no one lives on the moon, there are not air currents, nor is there any groundwater on the moon).

I'm not saying any of this is going to be practical or useful, but as long as we're going up there we should investigate this possibility. It's a lot less far fetched than using He3 for fusion power, and people are talking about that.

Re:Uranium?

[markov_chain]

(uranium is the most dense naturally occurring element in its pure form).

Hellooooo, osmium? Iridium?

ancient?

[neurostar]

solved a 400-year-old mystery

have confused moon-gazers since the time of ancient scientists

I'm not sure I'd consider 400 "ancient".

Re:ancient?

[ColdWetDog]

I dunno, I'm getting upwards of 50 and most days I get to be feeling "ancient".

400 years sounds really old. YMMV

Re:ancient?

[808140]

His point, probably, is that people have been looking at the sky -- and making very detailed, scientific observations about celestial bodies -- for many millennia, not just a few centuries. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a sophisticated understanding of all sorts of relatively complex phenomena that Europeans only figured out comparatively recently -- stuff like the precession of the equinoxes, etc. Given that, it is surprising that something that is apparently fairly easy to observe, on the largest object in the night sky, would have been a mystery for only 400 years.

Even on a human scale, 400 years isn't really that much, when you stop to think about it. Sure, it's longer than our lifespan -- at least 4 times longer, but in practice rather more -- but at the same time, if you're 50, that's only 8 times what you've already experienced yourself. I fully expect that future advances in medicine and genetics will allow humans to live this long. I do not expect, however, that we will be living a thousand years or more any time soon.

Lunar flatulance

[The Wooden Badger]

I can't help but laugh at the idea. The moon...gas...Metaphor for buttocks, especially exposed buttocks...gas...

Or

[Instine]

Its landing craft. Is an obvious second conclusion.

Obligatory Quote

[davisog]

"That's nothing. Outgassing, don't worry about it. Say, you seen that new BT-16?"

one word

[Anonymous Coward]

MOONFARTS

I've got a better idea.

[DragonTHC]

Moon Glass.

formed by meteor impacts.

the flashes are just a reflection of the sun.

mystery solved.

give me the medal.

Re:I've got a better idea.

[donteatyellowsnow]

NEGATIVE on that Houston. Someone email Gore and let him know *I* have discovered the cause of global warming.

Re:I've got a better idea.

[pln2bz]

Spoken like a true pseudoskeptic -- as if there is nothing of any interest in the entire world that has not already been fully explained by science. Pseudoskepticism has become a religion of sorts in the scientific community lately, and it's starting to have a noticeable effect on the way that we treat anomalous data. It's causing people to look the other way when we should be investigating. So long as general relativity and quantum mechanics don't agree with one another, and so long as there are still surprises in our space observations, pseudoskepticism is really premature. It's holding us back. Anomalies are still important. There are still plenty of them and we need to understand them. If we ignore them, then we can convince ourselves that we already understand everything -- and by doing that, a complete theory of everything that actually works will forever elude us.

Where is Jesus in all this?

[Jim in Buffalo]

I'm disgusted that a group of arrogant scientists would put forward some lame "scientific" explanation for something that is clearly the work of Jesus.

Re:Where is Jesus in all this?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, when my girlfriend was observing our own localized outgassing phenomenon she did say something along the lines of "Jesus Christ! You didn't have to destroy the atmosphere!" I took that that to mean that I am Jesus Christ (much to my surprise) and I suppose it's possible that the Moon once did have an atmosphere and that I accidentally blew it away. But it's been a long time and I don't remember for sure.

Probably means I should lay off the pizza though.

Re:Where is Jesus in all this?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's out in the garden with Carlos, running the leaf-blower.

"lunar atmosphere" ?

[MisterE]

He refers to "lunar atmosphere" - but the moon has no atmosphere. Shouldn't that be "lunar surface"?

Re:"lunar atmosphere" ?

[EvilSuggestions]

but the moon has no atmosphere.

Might want to tell that to the folks that have been there. They seem to believe the following:

Lunar Atmosphere

Diurnal temperature range: >100 K to <400 K (roughly -250 F to +250 F)
Total mass of atmosphere: ~25,000 kg
Surface pressure (night): 3 x 10-15 bar (2 x 10-12 torr)
Abundance at surface: 2 x 105 particles/cm3
Estimated Composition (particles per cubic cm):
Helium 4 (4He) - 40,000 ; Neon 20 (20Ne) - 40,000 ; Hydrogen (H2) - 35,000 Argon 40 (40Ar) - 30,000 ; Neon 22 (22Ne) - 5,000 ; Argon 36 (36Ar) - 2,000 Methane - 1000 ; Ammonia - 1000 ; Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 1000 Trace Oxygen (O+), Aluminum (Al+), Silicon (Si+)
Possible Phosphorus (P+), Sodium (Na+), Magnesium (Mg+)

Composition of the tenuous lunar atmosphere is poorly known and variable, these are estimates of the upper limits of the nighttime ambient atmosphere composition. Daytime levels were difficult to measure due to heating and outgassing of Apollo surface experiments.

Re:"lunar atmosphere" ?

[MisterE]

I see. The total mass of the atmosphere for the moon is about 55 thousand pounds or to put it in terms I can relate to... it would be the maximum load of approximately 18 Ford F-350 pick-up trucks.

For comparison, the Lunar Excursion Module weighed 15,264 Kg (about one quarter of the entire moon "atmosphere".)

The "surface pressure" is freakin' close to a vacuum as well.

NASA can call it what they want and so can Wallace and Gromit.... those conditions are the equivalent of "no atmosphere"

on the moon

[fastasleep]

the cheese cuts itself?