"(Nat. Geo. June 21, 2012) Soil on the moon can hover over the surface, and the temperature six feet (two meters) deep can be more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit (167 degrees Celsius) colder than the topsoil.Now researchers in Australia think they've solved the puzzle of moon soil's odd behavior: nanosize particles of lunar glass.Small bubbles of glass form on the moon when micrometeorites hit the lunar surface.Since the moon has no atmosphere to slow the projectiles, each one, no matter how tiny, "wreaks havoc," said Paul Warren, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the new study.Particles about a hundred microns wide—the size of a fine grain of beach sand—hit with enough force to melt bits of moon rock, forming tiny glass bubbles.In a new study, Marek Zbik of the Queensland University of Technology analyzed glass bubbles collected by Luna 16, the first Soviet probe to return a sample from the moon.Using a special type of x-ray microscope, Zbik constructed 3-D images of the bubbles' insides.Instead of containing gas, as bubbles usually do on Earth, the moon bubbles are "filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior," Zbik said in a press statement..." |
