WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – From the Earth to the moon…literally.
U.S. astronauts have recently found that traces of water inside the moon actually came from the Earth. The chemical water is believed to have made its way to the moon via meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites. It is believed that the moon was created from a hot cloud of debris when a planet about the size of Mars crashed into Earth. The findings suggest that the heat of the collision did not vaporize the water.
“Some of that water survived the impact, and that’s what we see in the moon,” Alberto Saal, a geologist at Brown University, told the Guardian.
The discovery, which stemmed from studies on samples brought back from the moon from as far back as 1971, is thought of as a significant step in fully identifying the role of carbon-bearing chondrites in the solar system.
“The new data provide the best evidence yet that the carbon-bearing chondrites were a common source of volatiles in the Earth and the moon, and perhaps the entire inner solar system,” Erik Hauri, a co-author of the study at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told the Guardian.