Moon May Have Once Had Water 89
Smivs writes "US scientists have found
evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed.The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.
Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.
But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.
This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence."
Re:Duh. (Score:2, Insightful)
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing a whaling tune
Re:Manifold Space (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Water on Moon and Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. We'd need to do some kind of molecular analysis before we made declarations like that.
Earth is virulently alive, it's thoroughly infested with life everywhere you look. It's quite possible that life found on, say, Mars would be a descendant of life from Earth: think bacterial spores riding a rock from impact ejecta.
If Mars-life has the same basic DNA chemistry and the same molecular chirality as Earth-life, then they're likely to have shared a common origin, which tells us nothing about the likelihood of life among the stars. If, however, Mars-life is entirely alien right down to the molecular level, then it's likely to be of independent origin - native Martian. That changes all the estimates of the likelihood of life spontaneously emerging, and gives us to expect a universe full of living things.
Vaporized doesn't mean destroyed. (Score:2, Insightful)
The atoms from the molecules still exist. Heck, the molecules probably still exist except for the few torn apart by very extreme heat and then used to oxidize other materials which probably would have been the loose Hydrogen. Almost all igneous rocks on Earth's surface, contain some water. They were formed at temperatures that "vaporize water".