Moon May Have Once Had Water

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."

Comments

Re:Duh.

[rugatero]

then how do you explain the song?

We're whalers on the moon
We carry a harpoon

But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing a whaling tune

Re:Manifold Space

[AmigaMMC]

I always thought Stephen Baxter was ahead of his time. In all his novels he shows an uncanny ability to predict a believable far away future.

Re:Water on Moon and Mars

[meringuoid]

If there's life on the closest planets to us, it's basically impossible for us to be the only intelligent life forms out there.

Not necessarily. We'd need to do some kind of molecular analysis before we made declarations like that.

Earth is virulently alive, it's thoroughly infested with life everywhere you look. It's quite possible that life found on, say, Mars would be a descendant of life from Earth: think bacterial spores riding a rock from impact ejecta.

If Mars-life has the same basic DNA chemistry and the same molecular chirality as Earth-life, then they're likely to have shared a common origin, which tells us nothing about the likelihood of life among the stars. If, however, Mars-life is entirely alien right down to the molecular level, then it's likely to be of independent origin - native Martian. That changes all the estimates of the likelihood of life spontaneously emerging, and gives us to expect a universe full of living things.

Vaporized doesn't mean destroyed.

[radiumhahn]

Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.

The atoms from the molecules still exist. Heck, the molecules probably still exist except for the few torn apart by very extreme heat and then used to oxidize other materials which probably would have been the loose Hydrogen. Almost all igneous rocks on Earth's surface, contain some water. They were formed at temperatures that "vaporize water".