Happy New Year everyone. There’s been a lovely bright full moon on display over the new year, allowing me to venture out for well lit evening walks, stopping every so often to study the bright lunar disc both unaided and with binoculars.
One very obvious thing you can notice from looking at the moon, especially naked eye, is the contrasting dark and light regions.
The dark regions are called lunar ‘maria’ which is latin for ‘sea’. These regions are relatively smooth and have a low abundance of craters, which suggests they’re younger than the brighter more heavily cratered regions.
But how can the moon, a dead world with no significant geological activity, have younger regions?
The answer is from giant impacts.
Imagine a massive asteroid hitting the moon. Not only will it generate a huge crater but the heat from the impact will cause the solid rock underneath to become molten and well up in a huge overflowing lava event. This overflow pours across the surface of the moon a bit like applying fresh plaster to a wall, masking all the old craters and creating what we now see as ‘maria’.
I’ll be talking about this and much more at our special moon night on the 27th Jan out at Abriachan Forest.