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Related: About this forumThere's An Enormous, Mysterious Mass Under the Moon's Largest Crater
Buried under the largest, oldest crater on the moon, scientists have discovered an enormous mass of dense material, possibly the remains of the asteroid that formed the crater some 4 billion years ago.
Astronomers led by Peter B. James from Baylor University discovered the hidden feature by combining data from NASAs GRAIL lunar orbiter mission and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at where regions of high gravity and therefore mass overlap with surface features like craters. They found a giant mass weighing down the floor of the South Pole-Aitken basin by more than a half mile.
Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. Thats roughly how much unexpected mass we detected, James said in a press release.
James and his colleagues suggest that one possible explanation for the underground material is that its the remains of a massive asteroid that slammed into the moon soon after its formation, causing the giant impact crater still visible today. The asteroid that made the impact would also have been large, perhaps one hundred miles across.
Alternatively, the mass might be a dense region caused by the moons magma ocean solidifying as our satellite cooled and aged. The Chinese lander Change-4 and its Yutu-2 rover are currently exploring the Von Karman crater within the South Pole-Aitken basin, and NASA also wants to target the South Pole for future exploration.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/06/11/south-pole-aitken-crater-moon-lunar-asteroid-mass/
5X
(3,972 posts)Consider it is the weight at the end of a string you are spinning around your head,
the heaviest portion of that weight will be on the outside.
Eyeball_Kid
(7,432 posts)But it's at the south pole of the Moon, where any gravitational pull from the earth that's significant enough would cause a rotation in which the mass is closest to the earth.
5X
(3,972 posts)so I would think it has come to some equilibrium, but who knows if the mass has an effect. just my theory.
Ohiogal
(32,002 posts)I thought maybe Trump went there trying to find Mars.
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(2,450 posts)Beartracks
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