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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.'"
if that pepperoni pizza I just consumed can cause outgassing events. My girlfriend says so, but I believe she is mistaken.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The man in the moon is not only farting in our general direction, he's flashing us at the same time, too!
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."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
>Can Slashdot editors fire-up Google before they post old theories as new ones?
You're new here, aren't you?
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Now astronomers are looking for the Burrito Cluster Nebula predicted by these events.
Table-ized A.I.
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.)
Philosophy.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_luna rsporadic.htm
The word "stuff" was thought to be too specific.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.