Word: solarity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...eight places," Armstrong explained, "always in the same kind of place-at the bottom of a crater." Last week Cornell Astronomer Thomas Gold offered a dramatic explanation. The moon, he says, may have been scorched by a huge flare-up of heat and light within the solar system...
Since the patches have survived on the lunar surface despite the moon's constant bombardment by micrometeorites and solar particles, Gold calculates that the event was relatively recent-perhaps less than 30,000 years ago. It probably lasted only ten to 100 seconds. The small craters show the effect of the blast because they are natural heat traps. What was the origin of this fiery outburst, which Gold figures was 100 times more powerful than ordinary sunlight? Writing in the current issue of Science, Gold speculates that it came from the sun itself, possibly as the result...
ized bacteria or other signs of ancient life. Fireman is analyzing the radioisotopes of helium, argon and hydrogen to determine the effects of the solar wind-a stream of high energy particles from the sun-on the lunar rock...
...addition to the argon that resulted from potassium decay, Schaeffer found an abundance of solar argon-and of helium and neon-that has collected during eons of bombardment by the sun. These particles were lodged only in the surface of the rocks, where they had remained undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years-more evidence that the moon's exterior has not undergone any recent upheavals...
Urey himself believes that if the moon does indeed prove to be "cold," its virtually intact primordial surface may provide not only important clues about the moon's beginnings but also about the origin of the solar system. The most ancient rocks found on earth are 3.3 billion years old, or more than a billion years younger than the planet itself, and the moon rocks from the Sea of Tranquillity are about the same age. Nonetheless, Urey and other cold-moon proponents think that when men reach the lunar highlands, which are generally considered to be older than...