The Moon Used To Protect Earth With Its Magnetic Field, NASA Discovers

Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth's surface was a hot, violent mess. At the time, there wasn’t life on Earth and the temperature was too high for any life form. At the same time, the sun was still a young star bombarding Earth with coronal mass ejections and flares.

However, what you might now know is that the Moon’s now-extinct magnetic shield might have helped maintain the Earth’s atmosphere, support, and nurture life in a habitable climate, as pointed out in a NASA-led study.

According to Jim Green, the chief scientist and study's lead author, it seems that the moon provided the Earth with an important protective barrier against the solar wind. This was very important for Earth to maintain the atmosphere during this era. He added that the research team looks forward to following up on those findings when NASA astronauts go to the Moon and return samples for the Moon’s South Pole.

Dominant theories predict that the Moon was born 4.5 billion years ago when the Theia planet crashed into Earth. The debris from this collision came together to form the Moon while the remainings fell back to Earth. The Moon’s gravity helped stabilize Earth’s spin axis that was so fast at the time, causing a day to last only 5 hours.

During that time, the Moon was much closer to Earth and looked much larger in the sky. The moon’s gravity pulled on the ocean, but the water was heated, so the moon moved away at about 1.5 inches per year.

Lead by NASA, the new study simulated how the magnetic fields of the moon and Earth worked 4 billion years ago bu building a computer model to study their behaviors at two positions in their orbits.

The scientists wrote that the magnetosphere of the moon would sometimes become the barrier separating the Earth-moon system and the harsh solar radiation. The reason behind this was that the magnetosphere stayed connected in the polar region of their respective planets. The solar wind particles could not penetrate the magnetic fields, and this was crucial for Earth’s evolution by keeping the atmosphere intact.

The interesting thing is these atmospheres exchanged matter. It’s likely that the sun’s ultraviolet light stripped electrons from neutral particles in the atmosphere of the Earth, which provided them with the charge to travel to the moon, according to NASA.

The moon could probably maintain a thin atmosphere this way. While thinking this about the moon is pretty weird, the fact that scientists found nitrogen in lunar rock samples means it’s totally possible that the Earth’s atmosphere once sent material to the become the ancient atmosphere of the moon, considering that nitrogen was and still is the largest component of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Scientists thank that the overlap period of this magnetic field between Earth and the moon might happen from 4.1 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. David Draper, the Deputy Chief Scientist at NASA the study co-author, said:

“Understanding the history of the Moon's magnetic field helps us understand not only possible early atmospheres, but how the lunar interior evolved. It tells us about what the Moon's core could have been like — probably a combination of both liquid and solid metal at some point in its history — and that is a very important piece of the puzzle for how the Moon works on the inside.”

Naturally, the interior of the Moon cooled down, lost its magnetosphere, and then its atmosphere. The majority of the magnetic field disappeared 3.2 billion years ago and was completely gone 1.5 billion years ago. Without a magnetic field, the sun’s solar wind stripped the early lunar atmosphere.

The thought that the air we’re breathing has gone to the moon and back is extremely fascinating. New discoveries like this just reveal a little bit more of the vast unknown knowledge before our eyes.

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