Mighty Dons Of Science News

Moon, like a big sponge, ab­sorbs elec­tric­ally charged par­t­i­cles from the Sun, which in turn com­bine with ox­y­gen in some lu­nar dust to make wa­ter, sci­en­tists say.

They add that the find­ing—made us­ing the In­di­an Chan­dra­yaan-1 lu­nar or­biter—al­so sug­gests a new way to make im­ages of the Moon and oth­er air­less So­lar Sys­tem bod­ies.

Hy­dro­gen flow on the moon as meas­ured by the Chan­dra­yaan-1 lu­nar or­biter's Sub-keV At­om Re­flect­ing An­a­lyz­er. (Cour­tesy ESA) 

Re­search­ers re­ported only last month that the moon has ei­ther wa­ter or a si­m­i­lar mol­e­cule, called hy­drox­yl.
The lu­nar sur­face is a loose col­lec­tion of ir­reg­u­lar dust grains, called reg­o­lith. In­com­ing par­t­i­cles are probably trapped in the spaces be­tween the grains and ab­sorbed, ac­cord­ing to sci­en­tists.
When this hap­pens to pro­tons—elec­tric­ally charged par­t­i­cles that lie at the cores of at­om­s—the pro­tons are ex­pected to com­bine with the ox­y­gen in the reg­o­lith to pro­duce hy­drox­yl and wa­ter, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors ex­plain.

The re­search group, Stas Barabash of the Swed­ish In­sti­tute of Space Phys­ics and col­leagues, re­ported the find­ings in a pa­per to be pub­lished in the jour­nal Plan­e­tary and Space Sci­ence.