The Moon, Earth's only natural satellite. Its gravity dominates the rise and fall of ocean tides, and its shimmer determines the fate of nocturnal creatures. How much time the moon "lives" is rarely clear. Scientists have been watching, when did this planet, which is vital to Earth, originate? And when did it end? Now, scientists have found key evidence to interpret the fate of the moon.
Breakthroughs have been made in continental lunar research
On October 19, 2021, the international authoritative academic journal Nature simultaneously published three research results from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences online, showing that Chinese scientists have found a new type of lunar sea basalt, which is 2 billion years old, and this figure has delayed the time for lunar magma to stop by 800 million years. Magmatic activity determines the "life and death" of the planet, and when the magma stops moving, it also means the end of life on the planet. Prior to this, the international scientific community recognized that lunar magmatic activity may have stopped 2.8 billion years ago. This figure is the answer scientists got after studying the soil that the American Apollo brought back from the moon in the 1970s. However, in December 2020, the Chinese lunar probe Chang'e-5 brought back 1731 grams of lunar soil from the moon. Through the newly collected lunar soil study, Chinese scientists have rewritten the time when the lunar magma stopped to 2 billion years ago, refreshing the age of the moon 'alive'.
The "Death" of the Moon
Scientists often believe that a planet's vitality comes from magmatic activity within it. At ultra-high temperatures, the fusion of various substances will stimulate the movement of the planet's exterior, for example, the Earth now has volcanic eruptions and the movement of land plates, which are brought about by magmatic activity inside the Earth. Natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes confirm that the earth is in its "prime" years. Compared to Earth, the silent moon suggests that it is a dead object. From the current evidence, the moon stopped geological activity about 2 billion years ago, a "dead" planet, will lose the protection of the magnetic field, resulting in the atmosphere is blown away by the solar wind, all kinds of solar radiation, meteorites, cosmic rays will directly bombard the surface of the planet, the overall environment can not be suitable for the survival of living things.
The "death" time of the Moon
Scientists use the principle of radioactive decay, a phenomenon that Marie Curie first discovered. Every once in a while, the amount of radioactive elements decreases. The radioactive decay reaction has a half-life, that is, every other fixed time, it decays by half, and then after a period of time it decays by half, it becomes 1/4 of the original, so that it becomes less and less with time. Originally, that element was called the radioactive matrix, and later that element was called the radioactive diaspora, and we only need to measure the content of these two elements, and we know the age when we compare them. Scientists used this method to detect the lunar soil brought back from the moon by the Chinese lunar probe Chang'e 5, and finally got the time of the moon's "death" 800 million years later than originally expected.
An extra 800 million years
The cooldown time of the moon is closely related to its specific birth time, so once the specific time of the moon cooling is determined, the formation time of the moon can be accurately determined, and the moon can be roughly seen in what the moon is formed, which can see the significance of the discovery made by Chang'e 5 and Chinese scientists this time.
Source: CCTV news client