"That's the nailer," said Saal of the glass spheres. He and his colleagues published their discovery in the July 10 issue of the journal Nature. One of the ramifications of the newfound water is that it calls into question some of the details about the way the moon formed. The most popular current theory is that a Mars-sized body sideswiped Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, creating a ring of debris that eventually coalesced into the moon. The debris-ring period, it's been argued, is the perfect time for all of the water in the moon rocks to have dissipated into space. This nicely explained the apparent dryness of moon rocks. "It could means that part of the moon (the deepest part, perhaps) was derived by condensation and cooling of the outer edge of the disk from which the moon formed and thereby incorporated water from Earth and the projectile that hit Earth," surmised David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at Caltech. He and Kaveh Pahlevan previously proposed the ring was the cause of the dry moon rocks. "The new paper by Saal is important because it challenges a long-held view that the moon is fundamentally different because it is bone-dry," Pahlevan told Discovery News. "Now the debate moves towards a quantitative comparison of lunar and terrestrial water budgets, and what they might tell us about events transpiring after the giant impact." Related Links: Larry O'Hanlon's blog: Earth Impacts David Chandler blogs on how a student helped in the moon water discovery. |
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