New Discovery: Core of the Moon filled with Water

An article by Fahad Akhtar    4 Comments

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Carnegie Institution for Science based in Washington carried out a research which suggests that moon has a lot of water inside its core and the total volume of water on moon is far more then originally thought. These new findings have casts some doubts on the theories about the creation of moon.

It is important to know that how water was originally discovered on the Moon. NASA initially discovered it by crashing a rocket into a lunar crater called Cabeus, which is located about 100 km (62 mi) from the south pole of the Moon. The crater has temperature below 100k (-173°C) and the impact’s findings suggested that there was about 1 billion gallons of water on moon. It was also thought that the water was left by impacts from meteors or comets which have been crashing into the moon for quite some time and did not come from within the moon itself. The low temperatures on crater allowed this water ice to remain on or near the crater surface for billions of years without sublimating.

But now the scientists have used a new method and examined crystals created from volcanic eruptions on the moon billions of years ago. These crystals kept lying on the surface of the moon until were found in 1972 by geologist Harrison Schmitt, who was on the moon as part of Apollo 17. After decades of improvements in technology to examine these crystals, the scientists are now able to look at seven different samples of magma trapped as melt inclusions within these crystals. The water content of the lunar magma was found to be 100 times higher than previously studied and suggest that there may be 1 billion Cabeus craters’ worth of water on the moon.

According Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution and the lead author of the study, the samples used in the study are representative of the whole moon and are the best way to calculate how much water is there on the moon. These samples indicate that while some of the water might have been from meteors or comets but most of it came from the inner core of the moon and share the same or similar origin as Earth.

The low quantities of water and other volatile compounds found on the moon, when compared to other inner planets and Earth, have always provided evidence that the moon was formed during a giant impact from a Mars-sized body that had enough energy to create seas of Magma. But now these new finding challenge this theory and suggest that the impact from this Mars-sized body was either much hotter or colder then previously thought. If the impact was colder, then some material including water wasn’t molten and was locked in the Moon’s interior. And if it was hotter then the rocks boiled and created a temporary atmosphere, which though short lived and dense, allowed the still forming Earth and Moon to exchange water.

This new discovery is also important because the presence of water tells you about the potential of a planet to sustain life.

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