A new study suggests the Moon's surface may have 'remelted' 4.35 billion years ago, potentially masking its true age.
The moon may have received a volcanic facelift, making it more than 100 million years older than rocks collected from its surface might suggest, a new study finds. For instance, there are rare lunar zircon minerals that suggest the moon was born about 4.5 billion years ago. In addition, many scientists who have created simulations of planetary formation suggest that a collision huge enough to create the moon was unlikely to happen a quarter-billion years after the origin of the solar system.
Although giant cosmic impacts were common in the solar system's earliest days, the orbital dynamics models suggest that most of the massive rocks behind such titanic clashes were swept up into larger bodies by about 4.4 billion years ago. Now, a new study suggests a possible explanation for this discrepancy — the lunar surface 'remelted' 4.35 billion years ago. This would have reset the age of lunar rocks, masking the moon's true age. Much about the origin of the moon remains shrouded in mystery. Previous research suggested it formed between a collision between the newborn Earth and a Mars-size rock dubbed Theia and other means. These rocks likely crystallized from the magma ocean that covered the moon after that final giant impact. The analyses suggested the moon is about 4.35 billion years old, which is a relatively young age. In comparison, the solar system began forming about 4.6 billion years ago, or about 250 million years earlier. 'You can't necessarily use the ages recorded by rocks to tell when the moon formed,' study lead author Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz, told Space.com. The cause of this remelting is the same kind of tidal effects that cause our planet's seas to rise and fall. Just as the moon's gravity tugs on Earth, so too does Earth's gravity pull on the moon
MOON VOLCANISM PLANETARY FORMATION TIDAL EFFECTS COSMOLOGY
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