Posted on 09/26/2019 9:46:29 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Billions of years ago, something slammed into the dark side of the moon and carved out a very, very large hole. Stretching 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) wide and 8 miles (13 km) deep, the South Pole-Aitken basin...
For decades, researchers have suspected that the gargantuan basin was created by a head-on collision with a very large, very fast meteor. Such an impact would have ripped the moon's crust apart and scattered chunks of lunar mantle across the crater's surface, providing a rare glimpse at what the moon is really made of.
...
Now, however... After analyzing the minerals in six plots of soil at the bottom of the South Pole-Aitken basin, a team of researchers argues that the crater's composition is all crust and no mantle, suggesting that whatever impact opened the crater billions of years ago did not hit hard enough to spray the moon's innards onto the surface.
... the team conducted reflectance tests on six patches of soil...
A crystalline rock called plagioclase was by far the most abundant mineral in each sample, accounting for 56% to 72% of the crater's composition, the researchers wrote. Formed as primordial oceans of lava cool, plagioclase is extremely common in the crusts of Earth and the moon alike, but it's less abundant in their mantles. Though the team detected other minerals in the crust that are more common in the moon's mantle, such as olivine, these rocks made up too small a fraction of the soil samples to suggest that part of the mantle had broken through the crust.
This mineral makeup complicates the theory that a giant, high-velocity meteor created the South Pole‐Aitken basin billions of years ago, as such an impact almost certainly would have scattered chunks of mantle over the lunar surface.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Momentum...
“Nobody knows what made the gargantuan crater on the dark side of the Moon”
A meteor.
When I see the word WEIRD in a title, I don’t open the story. When I come across it in the story I (usually) stop reading right there.
No,No, and No! Read it anyways! How the hell would you know what is idiotic or not if you don’t actually ingest it and digest it to see if it gives you gas or not?
Man, I wish firewalls would quit holding back discovery and whether it is BS or not. Hopefully we are personally intelligent enough to judge validity or not without needing to throw up a firewall?
Are we afraid of our own will power to resist ideology?
To throw up a firewall because of one phrase or word is ignorant my friend. At least read the input with a critical frame of mind. lol
And Flamadiddle Paradiddle Roll... :)
It killed all the lunar penguins.
Thanks for posting this!
You come up with some real goodies!!
TXnMA
Lunar Albedo: c. 0.12.
Terran Albedo: c. 0.36.
(Vangelis: Albedo 0.37.)
Near the south pole. Must have been a glancing blow. Maybe the blow that knocked it into our orbit ?
Or locked it in sync rotationally ?
Did earth ever have a 25 hour day. I find when I am on an unstructured vacation time, I shift to a 25 hour day— getting up an hour later each day.
We call that sleeping in.
what do you mean? They landed a man on Mars too. Sheila Jackson Lee said so.
The so-called circadian rhythm has been shown to be regulated by day length, IOW, without help, as with the Rhythm Method, we can't keep a beat. :^)
The 2004 topic I linked up there somewhere is the one to read, but it's not exactly pertinent because that antedates humanity. One of the old calendars (in use for a good long while) had months of exactly 30 days, and year length exactly 360 days long. That suggests a slower spin rate (about 98 percent of current) for the Earth -- the day would last a bit longer, and there would be fewer of them during orbit around the Sun; similarly, the Moon going at the same rate would take a little longer to "catch up with".
Yeah, that's gotta be it. :^)
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