Scientists have recently come up with a finding regarding the moon that is enough to surprise anyone. In the year 1972, astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan landed on the moon and after that, no one has landed on the lunar planet.
It was the Tauras-Littrow Valley, situated on Mare Serenitatis's edge, on which the astronauts landed. It was considered to be a geologically diverse location.
The astronauts gathered 110.5 Kg of lunar rock. Not only this, a total of 741 samples of soil were also collected by the astronauts. The highland crustal rocks, the basalt, and the breccia were some of the lunar rock types collected.
The age of the moon
The moon is around 40 million years old, as per the new study.
It seems to be formulated around 4.46 billion years ago. It was formed within the time span of the first 110 million years of the creation of the solar system.
In all these years, samples collected from the land of the moon have been studied thoroughly.
On October 23, 2023, findings regarding the age of the moon were published in the Geochemical Perspectives Letters. These findings are actually based on a technology known as atom probe tomography (APT).
A senior author of the study, Philip Heck, expressed in a statement, “I love the fact that this study was done on a sample that was collected and brought to Earth 51 years ago. At that time, atom probe tomography wasn’t developed yet and scientists wouldn’t have imagined the types of analyses we do today.”
Discovering the moon's age
The age of the moon thus stated is not a mere tentative assumption but actually a conclusion deduced after crystals from the lunar sample 72255 were reanalyzed by scientists. The sample contained zircon which was around 4.2 billion years old. This was some of the oldest zircon ever discovered.
Zircon is the oldest mineral existing on Earth as well. Moreover, geologists are of the view that the mineral contains important information relating to the formation of Earth and life on it.
In the novel study, scientists made use of APT to know about the clustering of lead found in the samples. The APT holds nanoscale spatial resolution. The distribution of lead. Why lead? Well, the distribution of lead is used to determine the age of zircon present in the rock. That is why, determining the distribution of lead is an important aspect of the study.
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