(ORDO NEWS) — If you want to know about the history of the Sun, look no further than the Moon.
This is the recommendation of a group of scientists who hope to use future Artemis lunar missions to help understand our home star’s life story.
The sun has always influenced all the bodies of the solar system. We receive not only heat and light from the Sun, but also a constant rain of high-energy particles and solar wind.
And it’s not just happening today, it’s been happening every single day for the last 4.5 billion years.
However, on planets like Earth, we have lost the ancient history of the Sun’s influence on us. Wind weathering, water erosion, and the constant cycles of plate tectonics take on any changes the Sun may have made to our crust and either blow it away or bury it deep in our mantle.
But Dead Worlds is much better at storing records, according to a new white paper that recently appeared in the arXiv preprint magazine.
And since the Moon is the closest dead world to us and the target of the Artemis mission series, we have to go there.
It must be admitted that since its formation, there has been some activity on the surface of the Moon, such as lava flows and impacts of asteroids and comets. But this activity actually helps rather than hinders, according to the white paper.
Lava flows can isolate large areas of the Moon’s surface from further interaction with the Sun. If we could dig underneath the flows and into the Moon’s deeper regolith, we’d have a snapshot of solar history before the lava erupted.
And while impacts do tend to mix things up, they also expose the deeper layers of the surface, giving us easy access to them.
The researchers have outlined several key quantities that we can measure from lunar samples and how they relate to solar activity.
For example, we can look at how long a sample has been exposed to cosmic rays and use this to model the rate at which the Sun has produced cosmic rays over the past few billion years.
We can also look at the trails left by high-energy particles as they penetrate the earth’s crust to get the same information.
Over time, the lunar soil slowly turns into breccia, and this process changes depending on the amount of solar radiation. radiation.
By comparing different samples at different depths and different locations, we can understand how the Sun’s brightness changes over time.
According to the official document, there is no more accessible place in the solar system where one could look into the ancient history of the Sun. .
Simply put, the Moon is a solar time capsule.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.