Was the moon magnetized by impact plasmas?
Name
sciadv.abb1475.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.65 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
14760fbfa49cc201297e825d1b1f3722
Author(s)
Oran, Rona
Weiss, Benjamin P
Shprits, Yuri
Miljković, Katarina
Tóth, Gábor
Date Issued
October 2020
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). The crusts of the Moon, Mercury, and many meteorite parent bodies are magnetized. Although the magnetizing field is commonly attributed to that of an ancient core dynamo, a longstanding hypothesized alternative is amplification of the interplanetary magnetic field and induced crustal field by plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, we use magnetohydrodynamic and impact simulations and analytic relationships to demonstrate that although impact plasmas can transiently enhance the field inside the Moon, the resulting fields are at least three orders of magnitude too weak to explain lunar crustal magnetic anomalies. This leaves a core dynamo as the only plausible source of most magnetization on the Moon.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIADV.ABB1475
