How did the Moon Protect our Earth like a Mother 4 Billion Years Ago?
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, before emerging of life, Earth's surface was so much hot like a hot red iron rod. That time our Sun bombarded our planet with violent outbursts of radiation called flares and coronal mass ejections. Charged particles from the sun kept our atmosphere and planet uninhabitable. But that time, one thing saved our planet from this threatened charged particles that is our Moon.
A study led by NASA said, The Moon seems to have presented a substantial protective barrier against the solar wind or charged particles for the Earth, which was difficult for the Earth to maintain its atmosphere during this time. More mysterious information will be known through the NASA's Artemis program which will return critical samples of the lunar South Pole.
Scientists created a computer model to know how the magnetic fields of the Earth and Moon worked towards each other about 4 billion years ago. As per the model, the magnetospheres of the Moon and Earth was connected in the polar regions of each object. The complete system of Earth-Moon magnetosphere served as a barrier to the harsh solar radiation which was raining down on the Earth. Thus, the high-energy solar wind particles could not completely break the coupled magnetic field and remove the atmosphere.
Scientists said, Moon never had a long-lasting global magnetic field because it has such a small core. A magnetic field causes electrical charges to move along invisible lines. Earth’s magnetic field can create beautifully colored aurora in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The study said, the extreme ultraviolet light from the Sun stripped electrons from neutral particles in Earth’s uppermost atmosphere and made those particles charged and enabled them to travel to the Moon along the lunar magnetic field lines. This may have contributed to the Moon maintaining a thin atmosphere at that time, too. The discovery of nitrogen in lunar rock samples support the idea that Moon's nitrogen was contributed by the Earth.
The study also said, when the Moon's interior cooled, it lost its magnetosphere and eventually its atmosphere. The field must have diminished significantly 3.2 billion years ago, and vanished by about 1.5 billion years ago. Without a magnetic field, the solar wind stripped the atmosphere away. The same situation happened to Mars, you can easily understand how Mars had lost its atmosphere.
Scientists' hope that If Moon performed a role to protect the Earth from the harmful radiation, then in a similar way, there may be other moons around terrestrial exoplanets in the galaxy which also help to preserve atmospheres for their host planets and may contribute to hold life.
(NASA)
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