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    The moon has been stealing Earth’s atmosphere for billions of years
    Space

    The moon has been stealing Earth’s atmosphere for billions of years

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    1. cnn on

      Particles from Earth’s atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years, mixing into the lunar soil, according to a new study.

      The research sheds new light on a puzzle that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith — the moon’s dusty surface layer.

      [Early studies](https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979LPICo.363…43T) theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo [suggested](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03929) that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The authors suspected that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it difficult or impossible for them to escape into space.

      Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth’s magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon — which continues to this day.

      “This means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time,” said Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York.

    2. tobias_the_letdown on

      Dirty little thief!

      On a serious note, would the particles build up be enough to reconstitute for use in fuels or would most of it seep back into space?

    5. theObfuscator on

      Declare the moon the 52nd US state and send ICE agents- thank you for your attention in this matter!

    8. Brrdock on

      No doubt, also doing its best to try to steal our oceans, that pesky self-important rock.

      You’d think the earth would be more effective in stealing the atmosphere back, though, so not like we’re really losing anything, no?

    12. Musicfan637 on

      I often wondered this after we have seen Charon steal Pluto’s air as well as the many moons of Saturn leaving trails that make rings. I have thought that the moon must get some of our off gassing.

    14. chainedtomydesk on

      Don’t tell Trump, he’ll stick tariffs on the moon… Or decide he needs to invade it for security reasons

    18. DrMikeH49 on

      It’s so unfair. They’re not being very nice to us, they don’t respect us. It’s all Obama’s and Biden’s fault, they were weak and didn’t stop it.