A recent study indicates that water may not be a unique substance only for the Earth. It is quite possible that it was one of the main substances of the ancient cosmic body, which was divided in half about 4.5 billion years ago and became the Earth and the Moon.
Indirect evidence of this was found in the framework of laboratory simulations, which showed how the mineral composition of the young Moon was formed. The data obtained may give rise to a new long debate on whether the Earth and the Moon contain water initially, or it was delivered to them as a result of numerous bombardments with comets and asteroids containing water.
“Our research shows that the water was already at the time of how the moon was formed. And since this time came shortly after the Earth was formed, this may indicate that there was water on these space bodies long before its “additional discharge” by comets and asteroids, ”says one of the leaders of the scientific team Wim van Westrenen from the Amsterdam Free University.
Traces of water in the samples of the lunar soil were found earlier, but more often they were young rock samples located on the surface of our satellite. This, in turn, of course, could not give an unequivocal answer to whether this water was part of the satellite initially, or it got there thanks to asteroids.
To understand the role of water in the process of forming a young moon, van Westrenen and his colleagues in the laboratory created small samples (weighing only 10 milligrams) of the breed, but containing all the basic ingredients that made up the moon itself. For example, they contained, among other things, components that initiated the lunar ocean from magma, which gradually cooled and solidified, forming the final appearance of our satellite.
“The main components are silicon and oxygen, as well as some of magnesium, calcium, iron, titanium, and aluminum,” says van Westrenen, pointing out that the composition fully complies with seismic analysis data carried out on the lunar surface using tools left the astronauts of the Apollo space missions.
Further, the team of Van Westren using the difference in temperature and pressure, corresponding to the conditions of the early Moon, simulated the evolutionary process of lunar geology. The work was carried out with the help of a scientific tool that scientists usually use to create artificial diamonds. The process was carried out with the presence of water and its absence, to see how this feature affects the type and number of emerging rocks.
The researchers found that only when water was added to the composition (as a percentage of all from 0.5 to 1), the types and number of the rocks produced fully corresponded to those indicators that are currently characteristic of the Moon itself.
More importantly, one of the final derivatives of the composition in which water was included was a layer of plagioclas - the dominant component of the composition of the lunar crust, which in this case would be about 34-43 kilometers thick. This, in turn, corresponds to the average thickness of the real layer of plagioclass, data on which was obtained in 2013 thanks to orbital satellites.
In the case when the composition was completely dehydrated, the layer of plagioclas was much thicker (in real conditions it would be 68 kilometers). This prompted the assumption that the present composition of the moon could only happen if it had initially included water.
Recent studies add to the piggy bank the arguments of the theory that the Earth and the Moon contained water initially. However, not everyone agrees with this opinion and believes that water appeared on these planetary objects after their formation, thanks to asteroids and comets. The weights of the first theory, among other things, add the data of 2014, when the Rosetta spacecraft approached its main goal, the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The information obtained clearly indicated that the traces of water on the comet have combinations of isotopes that do not correspond to the earth.
“This is another sign that the moon originally had water. These are very important data, as they give hope that water reserves can still be hidden deep under the crust of our satellite, ”says Robin Kanap, who studies the nature of space bodies at the Southwestern Boulder Research Institute (Colorado, USA) .
“The results of this work will still force us to reconsider some questions about how the material that formed the Moon could absorb the water that was on Earth,” comments Steve Jacobson from Evanson University, Northwestern University (Illinois, USA). .
Earlier this month, Jacobson announced the discovery of evidence about the deepest deposits of water on Earth, located at a depth of 1000 kilometers, which is equal to 1/3 of the distance from the surface to the core of the planet.
The article is based on materials .
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