Tuesday, July 31, 2007

When Moon Farts

Changes in the brightness and color over small areas of the moon's surface, known as Transient Lunar Phenomena have been observed telescopically for hundreds of years.

The optical flashes have been seen by skywatchers but rarely photographed.

"People over the years have attributed TLPs to all sorts of effects: turbulence in Earth's atmosphere, visual physiological effects, atmospheric smearing of light like a prism, and even psychological effects like hysteria or planted suggestion," said Columbia University researcher Arlin Crotts.
Using data from decades-old observations, Crotts and colleagues have now found a strong correlation between TLP sightings and regions where lunar orbiting spacecraft have detected gas leaking out from beneath the lunar surface.

"The areas selected consistently by TLP are the craters Aristarchus (in about 50 percent of sampled reports), Plato (about 15 percent) with Kepler, Copernicus, Tycho and Grimaldi all at the few percent level apiece," Crotts said.

This data ties in with observations made by the Apollo 15 and Lunar Prospector spacecraft which detected the gas radon-222 twice at Aristarchus and also once at Kepler and Grimaldi.

Moonquakes to blame?
Now Crotts and collaborators hope to achieve a larger sample of TLP sightings by using a robotic camera to keep watch on the moon in an effort to photograph any TLP events that may occur.

The camera, located at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile, will remove the gruesome task of continuously observing from the astronomer and provide observations free from the bias and inaccuracy that human eyes can introduce.

"It [the camera] will be more sensitive than the human eye/telescope combination, and more objective and persistent," Crotts said. "Hopefully it will give a better map of the TLP geographical distribution, as well as their timing and internal structure."

It is likely that the ghostly and fleeting TLP could be a manifestation of inert gases such as radon and argon being released from within the moon due to radioactive decay of uranium-238 and potassium K-40.

Moonquakes would seem a likely candidate for triggering the release of these gases but no correlation between TLP and moonquakes was found by Crotts.
More at:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20038217/
Posted by Ajay :: 6:19 PM :: 0 comments

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