Experts Find Possible Cause for 'Lunar Flashes'

For quite some time now, a lot of people have argued that the Moon “flashes” from time to time, in that variations in the luminescence of some of its regions change briefly at certain times. According to a recent investigation, conducted by Columbia University in New York (CUNY) Astronomer Arlin Crotts, the phenomenon may occur because of underground gas on Earth's natural satellite, which may be released violently on certain occasions. Crotts went about analyzing the flashes in a very “old-school” way, looking over 2,000 observations of so-called transient lunar phenomena (TLPs), spanning about 350 years of astronomical observations.

Upon completing the map of the sightings, he cross-referenced the newly obtained material with maps obtained from scientific sources, detailing the locations of known gas leaks on the lunar surface. He noticed that the most highly reported TLP area rested directly on top of the most active gas leak zones on the Moon. “It really boils down to just a small number of sites where [TLP] are happening consistently. That's almost exactly the same list of sites where people have seen radon [gas],” he explained, quoted by Nature News. “The prevailing paradigm is that there's very little volatile [gas] activity in the Moon at all.”

In the past, when NASA's Apollo program was still active, instruments detected concentrations of gases on the lunar surface, especially radon and argon. More recently, the Lunar Prospector mission confirmed the finds, but the planetary scientists who analyzed the data explained the phenomenon by pinpointing that the gases were the byproducts of natural radioactive decay deep underground. But Crotts suggests now that the gas may actually be building up inside the crust in large enough quantities. At some point, when the pressure inside the deposit becomes too great, it explodes through the surface, giving birth to the transient lunar phenomena some see from the Earth.

At this point, the expert is in the process of gathering more data on the gas, by using the automated telescopes of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile, and at the Columbia University. He acknowledges that the correlations he is about to publish in the May 20th issue of the Astrophysical Journal are simply circumstantial, and that more solid evidence is needed before a final conclusion can be drawn.