According to a new study, particles from Earth’s atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years and mixing into the lunar soil.

This recent research brings us anew light on a puzzle of the moon’s dusty surface layer that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith.

Some early studies theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo suggested that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The researchers concluded that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it every difficult or almost impossible for those particle to escape into space.

However, researchers in the latest study used advanced computer simulations and reached a different conclusion.

Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth’s magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon surface which continues to the present.

Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New Yor said that it means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time.

The long-term exchange of such particles means the moon surface might hold a chemical substance record of Earth’s atmosphere.

Please listen this article here-

Studying lunar soil could therefore might give us a rare window into how Earth’s climate, oceans and even life evolved over billions of years.

According to a new study, particles from Earth’s atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years and mixing into the lunar soil.

This recent research brings us anew light on a puzzle of the moon’s dusty surface layer that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith.

Some early studies theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo suggested that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The researchers concluded that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it every difficult or almost impossible for those particle to escape into space.

However, researchers in the latest study used advanced computer simulations and reached a different conclusion.

Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth’s magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon surface which continues to the present.

Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New Yor said that it means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time.

The long-term exchange of such particles means the moon surface might hold a chemical substance record of Earth’s atmosphere.

Please listen this article here-

Studying lunar soil could therefore might give us a rare window into how Earth’s climate, oceans and even life evolved over billions of years.