Believing they have solved a 40-year old mystery on why the rocks brought back by NASA’s Apollo astronauts were magnetized, scientists now believe that this phenomenon could have been caused by the dynamo or heart located within the moon – which generates a magnetic field that is believed to be stronger than the Earth.
The moon is known to have only about 1% of the Earth’s mass, and it is believed by scientists now to have a molten metallic core that actually causes it to generate a magnetic field that pulls the Earth; but then, some other scientists fail to agree with this view – they are of the mind that “the lunar soil picked up magnetic fields from impacting asteroids and other bodies, which spawned short-lived, but repeated, electrically charged plasmas.”
According to the researchers, they came to the conclusion of the moon’s core and magnetic field because of “a reanalysis of the Apollo samples, combined with data collected by a host of orbiting robotic probes, raises questions about how electrical conducting fluids came to exist in the moon’s core, creating a so-called dynamo that generated a global magnetic field.”
The dynamo core that drives the magnetic field of the moon is believed to have started some 4.2 billion to 3.6 billion years ago, but then, researchers continue to investigate whether the moon’s dynamo could have resulted from the moon’s spin angle or some other factors, and they continue to analyze the directions of the electron’s alignment to better understand the moon’s pull and how it impacts the Earth.
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