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Moon May Have Once Had Water

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the also-i-may-once-have-had-whisky dept.

Smivs writes "US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed.The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object. Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water. But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago. This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence."

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Manifold Space by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Informative

    Stephen Baxter wrote about tapping the water in the Moon in his novel Manifold Space. Apparently the notion of deep wells of water on the Moon has been seriously contemplated by astrophysicists since the early 70s.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Warning - Slashdot Title Spoiler by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The title says

    "..challenging SOME ELEMENTS of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed.."

    There is NO indication that the collision theory is wrong. It just gives a bit more detail about where liquid water was at the time. From TFA:

    "..."It suggests that water was present within the Earth before the giant collision that formed the Moon," Dr Saal explained.

    "That points to two possibilities: Water either was not completely vaporised in that collision or it was added a short time - less than 100 million years - afterward by volatiles introduced from the outside, such as with meteorites."

    I suggest that after the collision there was still a lot of water floating round the two bodies, which would have fallen back onto both, so there's no real mystery raised by discovering trace amounts of water.....

  3. Argh, no. by blair1q · · Score: 3, Informative

    The moon has water.
    The water is bound up in the rocky material, the same way it was on Earth 4.5 billion years ago (when Earth was still pretty much molten).

    Earth did not have pooling surface water until hundreds of millions of years later. The moon apparently cooled quickly enough that free water did not exude from the rocky material. Either that, or the moon is small enough that any exudate just floated off into space rather than forming an atmosphere (H20 is lighter than O2 or N2, so that is plausible, since there is no other gas in the lunar atmosphere, either).

    Slashdot articles are vetted by someone before becoming main topics, right? No? Yes? Is one of the criteria now how much controversy the wrong information in the article will cause?