A study has revealed that rocks sinking into the moon’s early mantle could hold the key to explaining why our lunar moon had a magnetic field in the past. magnetic field, like the field around Earth, but rock samples brought back by NASA astronauts 50 years ago indicate that they formed in the presence of a strong magnetic field.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, this is a mystery that has puzzled planetary scientists for decades, but a new study by experts from Brown University may have the answer.
Scientists suggest, that the moon The early rock was probably able to generate strong, intermittent magnetic fields as a result of the sinking of giant rocks through the liquid mantle during the first billion years before becoming a solid body.
This will explain how some moon rocks formed under a magnetic field, the team said, although there is no evidence of rocks around the moon today.
The rocks returned to Earth during NASA’s Apollo program, from 1968 to 1972, and provided large amounts of information about the history of the Moon, helping planetary scientists better understand how it formed, find what it’s made of, how it evolved and lost its magnetic field.
Analysis of the rocks revealed that some of them appeared to have formed in the presence of a strong magnetic field, a field that rivals Earth in terms of strength, and others did not.
However, it hasn’t been clear for decades how a moon-sized object, a quarter the size of Earth, could generate such a strong magnetic field.
In this new study, Earth scientists show that giant rock formations sinking into the moon’s mantle can produce a type of internal convection that generates strong magnetic fields.
The researchers say the processes may have produced strong magnetic fields intermittently during the first billion years of the moon’s history.
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