Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
-
-
By NASA
Scientists have hypothesized since the 1960s that the Sun is a source of ingredients that form water on the Moon. When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind smashes into the lunar surface, the idea goes, it triggers a chemical reaction that could make water molecules.
Now, in the most realistic lab simulation of this process yet, NASA-led researchers have confirmed this prediction.
The finding, researchers wrote in a March 17 paper in JGR Planets, has implications for NASA’s Artemis astronaut operations at the Moon’s South Pole. A critical resource for exploration, much of the water on the Moon is thought to be frozen in permanently shadowed regions at the poles.
“The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the Sun, which is always spitting out hydrogen, there’s a possibility of creating water,” Li Hsia Yeo, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s incredible to think about,” said Yeo, who led the study.
Solar wind flows constantly from the Sun. It’s made largely of protons, which are nuclei of hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons. Traveling at more than one million miles per hour, the solar wind bathes the entire solar system. We see evidence of it on Earth when it lights up our sky in auroral light shows.
Computer-processed data of the solar wind from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Download here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20278/ NASA/SwRI/Craig DeForest Most of the solar particles don’t reach the surface of Earth because our planet has a magnetic shield and an atmosphere to deflect them. But the Moon has no such protection. As computer models and lab experiments have shown, when protons smash into the Moon’s surface, which is made of a dusty and rocky material called regolith, they collide with electrons and recombine to form hydrogen atoms.
Then, the hydrogen atoms can migrate through the lunar surface and bond with the abundant oxygen atoms already present in minerals like silica to form hydroxyl (OH) molecules, a component of water, and water (H2O) molecules themselves.
Scientists have found evidence of both hydroxyl and water molecules in the Moon’s upper surface, just a few millimeters deep. These molecules leave behind a kind of chemical fingerprint — a noticeable dip in a wavy line on a graph that shows how light interacts with the regolith. With the current tools available, though, it is difficult to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water, so scientists use the term “water” to refer to either one or a mix of both molecules.
Many researchers think the solar wind is the main reason the molecules are there, though other sources like micrometeorite impacts could also help by creating heat and triggering chemical reactions.
In 2016, scientists discovered that water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon, it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. With a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. NASA’s LADEE spacecraft detected these water molecules as they entered the tenuous lunar atmosphere. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Spacecraft measurements had already hinted that the solar wind is the primary driver of water, or its components, at the lunar surface. One key clue, confirmed by Yeo’s team’s experiment: the Moon’s water-related spectral signal changes over the course of the day.
In some regions, it’s stronger in the cooler morning and fades as the surface heats up, likely because water and hydrogen molecules move around or escape to space. As the surface cools again at night, the signal peaks again. This daily cycle points to an active source — most likely the solar wind—replenishing tiny amounts of water on the Moon each day.
To test whether this is true, Yeo and her colleague, Jason McLain, a research scientist at NASA Goddard, built a custom apparatus to examine Apollo lunar samples. In a first, the apparatus held all experiment components inside: a solar particle beam device, an airless chamber that simulated the Moon’s environment, and a molecule detector. Their invention allowed the researchers to avoid ever taking the sample out of the chamber — as other experiments did — and exposing it to contamination from the water in the air.
“It took a long time and many iterations to design the apparatus components and get them all to fit inside,” said McLain, “but it was worth it, because once we eliminated all possible sources of contamination, we learned that this decades-old idea about the solar wind turns out to be true.”
Using dust from two different samples picked up on the Moon by NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Yeo and her colleagues first baked the samples to remove any possible water they could have picked up between air-tight storage in NASA’s space-sample curation facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Goddard’s lab. Then, they used a tiny particle accelerator to bombard the dust with mock solar wind for several days — the equivalent of 80,000 years on the Moon, based on the high dose of the particles used.
They used a detector called a spectrometer to measure how much light the dust molecules reflected, which showed how the samples’ chemical makeup changed over time.
In the end, the team saw a drop in the light signal that bounced to their detector precisely at the point in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — near 3 microns — where water typically absorbs energy, leaving a telltale signature.
While they can’t conclusively say if their experiment made water molecules, the researchers reported in their study that the shape and width of the dip in the wavy line on their graph suggests that both hydroxyl and water were produced in the lunar samples.
By Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Hubble Tracks a Roaming Magnetar of Unknown Origin
Article
2 hours ago
3 min read What Does NASA Science Do For Me?
Article
4 hours ago
3 min read Exploring the Universe Through Sight, Touch, and Sound
Article
20 hours ago
View the full article
-
By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 5 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Tracks a Roaming Magnetar of Unknown Origin
This is an artist’s impression of a magnetar, a special type of neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field. Credits:
ESA Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the magnetar called SGR 0501+4516 is traversing our galaxy from an unknown place of origin. Researchers say that this runaway magnetar is the likeliest candidate in our Milky Way galaxy for a magnetar that was not born in a supernova explosion as initially predicted. It is so strange it might even offer clues to the mechanism behind events known as fast radio bursts.
“Magnetars are neutron stars — the dead remnants of stars — composed entirely of neutrons. What makes magnetars unique is their extreme magnetic fields,” said Ashley Chrimes, lead author of the discovery paper published in the April 15 journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Chrimes is a European Space Agency Research Fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands.
Magnetars have comic-book-hero superpowers. A magnetar has a magnetic field about a trillion times more powerful than Earth’s magnetosphere. If a magnetar flew by Earth at half the Moon’s distance, its intense field would wipe out every credit card on our planet. If a human got within 600 miles, the magnetar would become a proverbial sci-fi death-ray, ripping apart every atom inside the body.
The magnetar’s strangeness was identified with the help of Hubble’s sensitive instruments as well as precise benchmarks from ESA’s (European Space Agency) Gaia spacecraft.
Initially, the mysterious magnetar was discovered in 2008 when NASA’s Swift Observatory spotted brief, intense flashes of gamma rays from the outskirts of the Milky Way. The source, which turned out to be one of only about 30 known magnetars in the Milky Way, was dubbed SGR 0501+4516.
This is an artist’s impression of a magnetar, which is a special type of neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field. Neutron stars are some of the most compact and extreme objects in the universe. These stars typically pack more than the mass of the Sun into a sphere of neutrons about 12 miles across. The neutron star is depicted as a white-blueish sphere. The magnetic field is shown as filaments streaming out from its polar regions. Illustration: ESA Because magnetars are neutron stars, the natural explanation for their formation is that they are born in supernovae, when a star explodes and can collapse down to an ultra-dense neutron star. This appeared to be the case for SGR 0501+4516, which is located close to a supernova remnant called HB9. The separation between the magnetar and the center of the supernova remnant on the sky is just 80 arcminutes, or slightly wider than your pinky finger when viewed at the end of your outstretched arm.
But a decade-long study with Hubble cast doubt on the magnetar’s birthplace. After initial observations with ground-based telescopes shortly after SGR 0501+4516’s discovery, researchers used Hubble’s exquisite sensitivity and steady pointing to spot the magnetar’s faint infrared glow in 2010, 2012, and 2020. Each of these images was aligned to a reference frame defined by observations from the Gaia spacecraft, which has crafted an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of nearly two billion stars in the Milky Way. This method revealed the subtle motion of the magnetar as it traversed the sky.
“All of this movement we measure is smaller than a single pixel of a Hubble image,” said co-investigator Joe Lyman of the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. “Being able to robustly perform such measurements really is a testament to the long-term stability of Hubble.”
By tracking the magnetar’s position, the team was able to measure the object’s apparent motion across the sky. Both the speed and direction of SGR 0501+4516’s movement showed that the magnetar could not be associated with the nearby supernova remnant. Tracing the magnetar’s trajectory thousands of years into the past showed that there were no other supernova remnants or massive star clusters with which it could be associated.
If SGR 0501+4516 was not born in a supernova, the magnetar must either be older than its estimated 20,000-year age, or it may have formed in another way. Magnetars may also be able to form through the merger of two lower-mass neutron stars or through a process called accretion-induced collapse. Accretion-induced collapse requires a binary star system containing a white dwarf: the core of a dead Sun-like star. If the white dwarf pulls in gas from its companion, it can grow too massive to support itself, leading to an explosion — or possibly the creation of a magnetar.
“Normally, this scenario leads to the ignition of nuclear reactions, and the white dwarf exploding, leaving nothing behind. But it has been theorized that under certain conditions, the white dwarf can instead collapse into a neutron star. We think this might be how SGR 0501 was born,” added Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
Understanding Fast Radio Bursts
SGR 0501+4516 is currently the best candidate for a magnetar in our galaxy that may have formed through a merger or accretion-induced collapse. Magnetars that form through accretion-induced collapse could provide an explanation for some of the mysterious fast radio bursts, which are brief but powerful flashes of radio waves. In particular, this scenario may explain the origin of fast radio bursts that emerge from stellar populations too ancient to have recently birthed stars massive enough to explode as supernovae.
“Magnetar birth rates and formation scenarios are among the most pressing questions in high-energy astrophysics, with implications for many of the universe’s most powerful transient events, such as gamma-ray bursts, super-luminous supernovae, and fast radio bursts,” said Nanda Rea of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain.
The research team has further Hubble observations planned to study the origins of other magnetars in the Milky Way, helping to understand how these extreme magnetic objects form.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Related Images & Videos
Illustration of Magnetar
This is an artist’s impression of a magnetar, which is a special type of neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field.
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 15, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble
bethany.downer@esahubble.org
Garching, Germany
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
Science Ashley Chrimes
ESA-ESTEC/Radboud University
Related Terms
Hubble Space Telescope Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Goddard Space Flight Center Magnetars Neutron Stars Stars The Universe
Related Links and Documents
ESA/Hubble’s Release The science paper by A.A. Chrimes et al.
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble Science Highlights
Hubble Images
Hubble News
View the full article
-
By NASA
3 min read
What Does NASA Science Do For Me?
It is easy to forget that all of the hard work, technology, and money that NASA pours into space research actually comes back down to Earth. In fact, many of NASA’s missions and research focus on our planet! NASA also has many other projects with partners that use their research to enrich everyone’s lives here on Earth- and this is not including such notable achievements as satellite weather maps!
The NASA Spinoff program was created over fifty years ago to facilitate the licensing and development of NASA’s technologies for commercial use by other companies and agencies. This program helps “spin off” NASA’s technology for use by others here on Earth and, in some cases, in space. To date, over 2,000 spinoff technologies have been documented by the NASA Spinoff program.
Some notable examples of NASA spinoffs include:
Solar Cells Water Purification Memory foam for your cozy bed and chairs Firefighting equipment, especially lightweight fireproof clothing and masks with much-improved air filters Highway safety grooves, which help your car go around curves without slipping off by giving your tire better traction Many safety features in modern aircraft, such as de-icing technologies for wings, chemical detectors and imaging for plane maintenance, improved flight controls, and many more Image stabilization for your binoculars and video cameras The Dustbuster Healthier baby food …and many more! Check out this Wikipedia page for a more extensive list of the technologies that NASA has had a direct role in developing, many of which we now take for granted.
It is worth noting that there are a few technologies commonly thought to have been created by NASA that were actually independently developed. Tang is a great example; it was developed by General Foods in 1957 and attained fame when used during food testing by NASA in the 60s (even though some astronauts were not fans of the powdery, not-quite-orange juice). The microwave oven is another famous technology often falsely thought of as a NASA development. It was, in fact, created shortly after World War 2, when radar technicians discovered that it wasn’t such a good idea to stand in front of active equipment! Thankfully, they found out via a melted candy bar and not from severe burns!
Every year, NASA releases a report on its program, and the 2025 edition of the NASA Spinoff magazine is now available! You can view the entire NASA Spinoff archive, dating back to 1976, here.
Originally posted by Dave Prosper: May 2013
Last Updated by Kat Troche: March 2025
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.