(ORDO NEWS) — We seem to have reached a point where another idea to fight global warming doesn’t seem too weird anymore, because phasing out fossil fuels doesn’t seem to help much.
In a quest to find a way to avoid warming the planet, scientists have calculated whether dust can be used as a sun shield. They found that it could work, but only if dust kicked up from the moon .
The idea of blocking sunlight to slow down global warming has been around for almost as long as the awareness of its dangers. Most experts considered the idea prohibitively expensive or at risk for dangerous side effects.
Scientists propose a new version of the idea, trying to understand how a large amount of dust at the Lagrange 1 (L1) point will affect the heat balance of the Earth.
Similar to L2, where the James Webb Telescope (JWST) is located, L1 is the point where the gravitational fields of the Earth, Sun, and Moon are in balance, allowing objects to stay there long enough. This means that dust at the L1 level can be there for several days.
Previous proposals by scientists have usually considered placing some kind of umbrella made of very thin material on L1, but observations of other star systems have demonstrated how effective dust can be as an astronomical dimming device.
Unfortunately, even with rocket launch prices falling, shipping the 10 million tons of dust a year needed to reduce sunlight by 1.8 percent remains an extremely costly task. If only we had a dust source that wasn’t so far away.
In fact, it exists. The moon is nearby and it’s incredibly dusty. In addition to much less gravity, the absence of an atmosphere means launches from the lunar surface don’t have to worry about heavy heat shields.
It is very good that the most common particle size of lunar dust is about 0.2 micrometers. According to the authors, this size should provide the best balance of shading.
“It’s amazing to think about how lunar dust, which has taken more than four billion years to form, will help slow the rise in Earth’s temperature, a problem that has taken us less than 300 years to create,” said astrophysicist Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The experience of the authors of the study is based on the study of the processes of planet formation, that is, they are familiar with the dusty astronomical environment.
“If we take a small amount of material, put it in a special orbit between the Earth and the Sun, and destroy it, we can block a lot of sunlight with a small amount of mass,” said Professor Ben Bromley of the University of Utah.
On the other hand, scientists see some uncertainty in this. Along with gravitational forces, dust is affected by the pressure of sunlight and solar wind.
The latter depends on events such as coronal mass ejections, making it impossible to accurately predict how long the occultation will last.
“It was quite difficult to get the shield to stay on L1 long enough to cast a meaningful shadow.
However, this should not come as a surprise since L1 is a point of unstable equilibrium,” said student Sameer Khan from the University of Utah.
“Even the slightest deviation in the solar screen’s orbit can cause it to move quickly, so our simulations had to be extremely accurate.”
However, the team concluded that the stream of dust thrown off the surface of the Moon in the direction of L1 would not be constant enough to bring an ice age to Earth.
Building a machine on the Moon capable of digging, sorting, and launching dust would be an expensive undertaking. The authors do not yet claim to have found a solution to this problem.
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