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The Moon Has a Fluid Outer Core
mapkinase writes with this excerpt from Discovery News:
"The Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment recorded motions of the ground from moonquakes and other activities generating sound waves until late 1977. The network was too limited to directly monitor waves bouncing off or scattered by the moon's core, leaving scientists dependent on more indirect techniques, such as measuring minute gravitational changes, to craft a picture of the moon's interior. Those models turned out to be pretty accurate, says lead scientist Renee Weber, with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The new research confirms the existence of a solid inner core and liquid outer layer, similar to Earth's. Unlike Earth, the moon also has a partly melted, mushy layer over that."
Molten cheese?
I thought the solid Moon was a done deal. Was I misinformed, or is this groundbreaking science (forgive the pun)?
I was hoping for caramel.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Where does the energy come from to keep the layer fluid?
I thought the moon had cooled and solidified because it does not have the decaying Potassium Uranium and Thorium isotopes to provide heat.
Does it get it's energy from being squished by gravity, like the moons of Jupiter, or does that require multiple moons?
So if the moon started out with heavy elements like uranium, a lot of them will be in the core now, keeping it warm. The crust is mainly light stuff, silicon, etc, with the occasional lump of meteoric iron.
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it looks artificial like no other thing in the solar system does. so much that that many asteroids hitting over all those aeons only had had created that many impact and changed its landscape only so much. absurdly, its uniform gray dust.
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Si o que?
Arthur C. Clarke had a novel where they used the molten moon core as a weapon against spaceships.
So can we assume the inner core is most likely Parmesan?
What's a cthulhu? fhtagn...wha?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Is that what you are saying?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There have been discussions of a probe to Uranus. Don't the Slashdot editors realize how many more silly jokes and pageviews this could generate? As a stockholder in GKNT, I demand that you post a story about the Uranus probe.
So all we have to do is build a drilling thingy, go down to the core and restart its rotation with nukes a la The Core. Presto, livable moon and no more city destroying earthquakes, right?
It's a layer of cheeze whiz!
for everybody!
First sand traps, and now there's even a liquid outer layer on the moon? Man, that's gotta mess with anybody's golf handicap!
Of course it's fluid. What do they think the Whalers sail on?
It also means that we can drill in various places, and get more than enough heat to run a base. That will be important if we are going to try and move around the moon and not just the poles.
Now, what is needed is to check to see if Mars has a Molten core. If so, then we have our power to colonize it.
All those dark "mare" craters that were apparently volcanic at one point - doesn't this require a molten core?
Yes, I totally agree. It did bother me too. But the general consensus seem to be that they are much older, which is why the are underlying the craters, not the other wat around.
What was the age of those Mares then? IIRC, the general view was that they are so old that they 'froze' around the birth of Jes, err, The Earth.
But, this molten core could mean the mares are much younger, I guess!
But then, if the moon really is formed out of stuff from earth (which contains a lot of iron ore), and it *does* have a liquid core (making that iron spin) - then why does it not have a proper magnetic field ? Is its rotation too slow ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
flat. it has mountains and valleys that dwarf anything here on earth, however it doesnt have huge oceans covering huge depths, or huge mountain ranges that go half a continent, like here. its appalling that you talk about mountains and valleys yet forget huge oceans that have 11,000 m as their deepest point in a hole that covers almost half of the planet on one side, not to mention others in other oceans. its not just a mountain, it is a huge inward landscape on all sides of the planet, and outer protrusion on other. take oceans off of the earth in your mind's eye, then rethink.
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Cheese at warm temperature is a liquid!
Mmm, all that melted cheese.
Nothing to see here. Move on.