The Moon holds clues to the evolution of Earth, the planets, and the Sun, and a new NASA-funded study is helping scientists better understand some of the mysteries beneath the
Marshall Star for February 14, 2024 miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Granites are nearly absent in the Solar System outside of Earth. Achieving granitic compositions in magmatic systems requires multi-stage melting and fractionation, which also increases the concentration of radiogenic elements1. Abundant water and plate tectonics facilitate these processes on Earth, aiding in remelting. Although these drivers are absent on the Moon, small granite samples have been found, but details of their origin and the scale of systems they represent are unknown2. Here we report microwave-wavelength measurements of an anomalously hot geothermal source that is best explained by the presence of an approximately 50-kilometre-diameter granitic system below the thorium-rich farside feature known as Compton–Belkovich. Passive microwave radiometry is sensitive to the integrated thermal gradient to several wavelengths depth. The 3–37-gigahertz antenna temperatures of the Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 microwave instruments allow us to measure a peak heat f