The Lightning Storms of the Moon

[zorgon]

The Lightning Storms of the Moon

That the moon is not so tranquil as it looks, and is indeed acted upon by capricious bolts of untrammeled electrical energy will come as no surprise to Trebuchet readers of a certain vintage.

Those of us raised on the frankly disturbing confection 'Space Dust' (before it was banned by the meddlesome 'Elfin Safety' busybodies) are aware of how sprightly supposedly inert outer-space matter can be.

The moon appears to be a tranquil place, but modeling done by University of New Hampshire (UNH) and NASA scientists suggests that, over the eons, periodic storms of solar energetic particles may have significantly altered the properties of the soil in the moon's coldest craters through the process of sparking—a finding that could change our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system.

The study, published August 8 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, proposes that high-energy particles from uncommon, large solar storms penetrate the moon's frigid, polar regions and electrically charge the soil. The charging may create sparking, or electrostatic breakdown, and this "breakdown weathering" process has possibly changed the very nature of the moon's polar soil, suggesting that permanently shadowed regions, which hold clues to our solar system's past, may be more active than previously thought.

"Decoding the history recorded within these cold, dark craters requires understanding what processes affect their soil," said Andrew Jordan of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and lead author of the paper. "To that end, we built a computer model to estimate how high-energy particles detected by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) can create significant electric fields in the top layer of lunar soil."

The scientists also used data from the Electron, Moon electricity by Andrew Jordan/UNHProton, and Alpha Monitor (EPAM) on the Advanced Composition Explorer. CRaTER, which is led by scientists from UNH, and EPAM both detect high-energy particles, including solar energetic particles (SEPs). SEPs, after being created by solar storms, stream through space and bombard the moon. These particles can buildup electric charges faster than the soil can dissipate them and may cause sparking, particularly in the polar cold of permanently shadowed regions—unique lunar sites as cold as minus 240 degrees Celsius (minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit) that may contain water ice.


(Illustration shows a permanently shadowed region of the moon undergoing subsurface sparking (the 'lightning bolts'), which ejects vaporized material (the 'clouds') from the surface. Subsurface sparking occurs at a depth of about one millimeter. Image not to scale.)

"Sparking is a process in which electrons, released from the soil grains by strong electric fields, race through the material so quickly that they vaporize little channels," said Jordan. Repeated sparking with each large solar storm could gradually grow these channels large enough to fragment the grains, disintegrating the soil into smaller particles of distinct minerals, Jordan and colleagues hypothesize.

The next phase of this research will involve investigating whether other instruments aboard LRO could detect evidence for sparking in lunar soil, as well as improving the model to better understand the process and its consequences.

"If breakdown weathering occurs on the moon, then it has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system, especially in extremely cold regions that are exposed to harsh radiation from space," said coauthor Timothy Stubbs of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Image: Andrew Jordan/UNH

[Dyna]

How very interesting! I was just reading about the recent flare and the 2012 flare The possible effects such flares may have had on Earth and life.

Different subject but related.

X-Ray Bursts from the Center of the Galaxy Could Shape the Evolution of Life

If you were standing on Earth six million years ago, the sky would have shone with the light of two suns. That is, it would have if you had x-ray vision.

That's because Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy that carries the weight of four million suns, was throwing a fit.

Here on Earth, the eruption lit up the night with an x-ray shower that lasted up to a hundred thousand years.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/x-ray-bursts-from-the-center-of-the-galaxy-could-shape-the-evolution-of-life
http://news.psu.edu/story/361942/2015/07/01/research/black-hole-caught-burping-rare-x-ray-flare