14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have known for a while that there is water on the Moon. Granted, it’s in low quantities and in ice form. The big question though is how it got there.
Comets, which are mostly ice of different sorts, were a likely candidate, but researchers at the University of Tennessee now show evidence for the alternative theory.
They believe the water found on the Moon is formed there under the actions of solar wind constantly bombarding the Moon, which has no atmosphere or magnetosphere to shield it.
They propose that charged hydrogen particles brought by solarwinds combine with oxygen particles found on the Moon to form hydroxyls, a compound made up of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Water contains two hydrogen atoms, of course.
The researchers believe that these hydroxyls are quite common on the Moon. However, they're not much use for any potential missions or settlements on the Moon, actual water would have been a lot easier to extract and use.
To determine whether the water found on the Moon was created on the spot, scientists looked at the abundance of deuterium, the hydrogen isotope, in the samples they had.
Deuterium is found in relatively large quantities throughout the bodies in the Solar System, remnants of the cosmic dust that created it.
However, in the sun, it is rapidly consumed in the fusion process. As a result, hydrogen coming from the sun contains much less deuterium.
This is what scientists found in the samples they analyzed, indicating that most of the hydrogen in the hydroxyls found on the Moon came from the Sun.
What this means is that there is a high likelihood of water or hydroxyls being found on all other planets, moons or asteroids in the Solar System, formed via the same phenomenon. The paper describing the findings was published in the Nature Geoscience journal.