The research revealed that one side of the Moon’s surface might have been impacted when a massive asteroid slammed into it around 4.3 billion years ago.
A research report published earlier this month revealed that ancient collisions on the Moon’s south pole changed patterns of convection in the lunar mantle.
As per International Astronomical Union, there are more than 9,000 visible craters pockmarking the Moon. The craters have been made due to the impacts from meteors, asteroids and comets over billions of years.
However, the marking, or the craters, are not evenly distributed as it has been seen that the far side of the moon comparatively has a higher concentration of craters than the visible near side. The experts claimed that they have found the answer.
As per the latest study published in the journal Science Advances, it has been revealed that the South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin on the lunar surface would have created a massive plume of heat. The heat probably propagated through the lunar interior.
For the unversed, the SPA basin is an immense impact crater on the far side of the Moon. The report mentioned that the plume would have carried certain materials, which is a suite of rare-Earth and heat-producing elements — to the Moon’s nearside.
That concentration of elements might have created the nearside volcanic plains and would also have contributed to the volcanism.
“We know that big impacts like the one that formed SPA would create a lot of heat,” said Matt Jones, who is a PhD candidate at Brown University and the study’s lead author.
“The question is how that heat affects the Moon’s interior dynamics. What we show is that under any plausible conditions at the time that SPA formed, it ends up concentrating these heat-producing elements on the nearside. We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface,” Jones added.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings