Tiny Glass Beads Suggest Moon Had Active Volcanoes When Dinosaurs Roamed Earth

NEW YORK (AP) — Volcanoes were still erupting on the moon when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a new study suggests.

The proof: three tiny glass beads torn from the moon surface and brought back to Earth in 2020 by a Chinese spacecraft. Their chemical composition indicates that there were active lunar volcanoes until about 120 million years ago, much later than scientists thought.

A previous analysis of rock samples Scientists on the Chang’e 5 mission had suggested that the volcanoes went extinct 2 billion years ago. Previous estimates went back as far as 4 billion years.

The research was published Thursday in the Science Review.

“It was a little unexpected,” said Julie Stopar, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute who was not involved in the research.

Images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2014 also suggested more recent volcanic activity. The glass beads are the first physical evidence of this, Stopar said, although more research is needed to confirm their origin.

The Chang’e 5 samples were the first to be returned to Earth since those collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts and Soviet spacecraft in the 1970s. In June, China returned samples from the moon. hidden face of the moon.

This research could help us understand how long small planets and moons — including our own — can remain volcanically active, study co-author He Yuyang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in an email.

Researchers studied about 3,000 lunar glass beads smaller than a pinhead and found three that showed signs of coming from a volcano. Glass beads can form on the Moon when molten droplets cool after a volcanic eruption or meteorite impact.

Existing timelines suggest the moon had already cooled beyond the point of volcanic activity by the time suggested by the new research, Stopar noted.

“This should inspire many more studies to try to understand how this could have happened,” she said.

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