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

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.

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.)