The moon may have melted 4.35 billion years ago—explaining a lunar age mystery
The moon is Earth’s closest neighbor in space and the only extraterrestrial body humans have visited. Yet scientists are still unsure exactly when a Mars-size meteoriteoffers a way to explain that 150-million-year gap
The moon is slowly moving away from Earth, so its orbit isn’t circular. As it moves, it is squeezed and stretched by Earth’s gravity, resulting in what is known as tidal heating—and one of these heating events likely happened 4.35 billion years ago. This early moon would have looked like Jupiter’s moon Io, says the new study’s lead author Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz. “It would have had volcanoes all over its surface,” he says.
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