The Moon has become harder: scientists may have found the cause of a huge "magmatic event" over 4 billion years ago

Scientists suggest that the Moon became significantly harder in a relatively short period of time after it formed 4.4 billion years ago. By examining rocks collected during the Apollo missions, scientists believe they have found evidence of a major magmatic event that occurred about 100 million years after the Earth's satellite was formed.

The cause of the changes on the Moon could be a collision that created the largest known crater in the solar system. Scientists were looking for clues to this mystery in zircons, IflScience reports.

The team dated more than 500 zircons from lunar samples and reported a peak in their age distribution of about 4.33 billion years. According to the scientists, zircons are formed when lunar magma solidifies, and their dating provides insight into the chronology of the Moon. The abundance of zircons from the time when the Moon should have solidified suggests that this could have been due to an event. Perhaps it was a period of intense asteroid impact.

The research team believes that the strongest evidence supports the idea that this unknown event was caused by an impact that produced the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

"In our study, we found evidence of a large, potentially global magmatic event on the Moon 4.338 billion years ago. Such a powerful impact could have dug up lunar mantle material from great depths. We speculate that the zircons we dated probably crystallized in the impact melt layer as it cooled and differentiated. Subsequent impacts could have distributed these zircons across the lunar surface," explained study co-author Dr. Melanie Barboni of Arizona State University.

The scientist emphasized the timeliness of this discovery. "Our study is particularly timely given the recent return of the first samples from the South Pole-Eitken basin by China's Chang'e 6 mission. The combination of these new samples and our zircon age data could significantly improve our understanding of the history of this large impact basin and the broader impact history of the early solar system," Dr. Barboni added.

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