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posted by takyon on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-yer-pickaxe dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Scientists discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

[A] Baylor University study [DOI: 10.1029/2019GL082252] [DX], published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, combined data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) missions and found the huge blob lurking over a hundred miles beneath the South Pole-Aitken basin.

The mass, which isn't immediately obvious on the surface, appears to be dragging down the lunar landscape above it by around half a mile. In terms of size, lead author of the paper, Peter B. James, compared it to a pile of metal five times the size of Hawaii's big island.

[...] The scientists have a number of theories for where this mass could have come from, including one that involves the solidification of an ocean of lunar magma.

The leading theory posits the mass comes from an asteroid with an iron-nickel core that smacked into the lunar surface four billion years ago. Scientists calculated that a sufficiently dispersed impactor core could remain suspended in the Moon's mantle rather than sink to the core.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @10:42AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @10:42AM (#854605)

    If anyone cares, I already answered this with a quote/link interspersed with this ACs trolling elsewhere in this thread.

    CMEs as described in the parent's link seem to be an entirely different phenomena than the much rarer Fe and He3 rich ejections under discussion. And we've observed so few of those we have no idea what the distribution of mass and concentration looks like.

    Anyway what could have been an interesting discussion was ruined by a political troll because I'm done.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @10:49AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @10:49AM (#854606)

    Anyway what could have been an interesting discussion was ruined by a political troll because I'm done.

    Thank goodness for small favors.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:20AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:20AM (#854616)

      Looking at you proudly ruling over the shithole you created.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:57AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @11:57AM (#854627)

        Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

        You've made the former, yet provided none (not even ordinary evidence) of the latter.

        Who's shitting all over this?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @03:19PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @03:19PM (#854670)

          I'm just trying to read something about nvidia and your ilk is all over that thread too. Political morons are ruining the internet.