Scientists are looking for the secrets of the history of the sun on the moon
The sun has always affected all bodies in the solar system. We receive not only heat and light from the sun, but also a steady rain of high-energy particles and the solar wind.
If you want to learn about the history of the sun, look no further than the moon. This is a recommendation from scientists who hope to harness future Artemis lunar missions to help understand the life history of our star.
And that's not just happening today, but every day for the past 4.5 billion years.
But on planets like Earth we have lost the ancient history of the sun's influence on us. Weathering from winds, erosion from water, and the continuous cycles of plate tectonics take whatever changes the sun might have made to our crust and either blow them off or bury them deep in our mantle.
But dead worlds are much better at keeping records, according to a new research paper that appeared recently in the preprint journal arXiv.
And since the Moon is our nearest dead world, and is the target of the Artemis series of missions, we must go look there.
It is recognized that there has been some surface activity on the Moon since its initial formation, such as lava flows and impacts of asteroids and comets. But this activity is actually a help rather than a hindrance, according to the research paper.
Lava flows can block large portions of the moon's surface from further interaction with the sun. And if we were able to drill down the flows and deep into the regolith of the Moon, we'd get a snapshot of solar history before the lava flows.
And while the effects tend to mix things up, they also reveal deeper layers of the surface, allowing us to easily access them.
The researchers identified some of the key quantities we can measure from lunar samples and how they relate to the sun's activity.
For example, we can look at how long a sample has been exposed to cosmic rays and use that to model the rate at which cosmic rays have been produced by the Sun over the past few billions.
We can also look at the paths left by high-energy particles burrowing into the crust to get the same information.
Over time, lunar soil slowly turns into coalescing rock, and this process changes with the amount of solar radiation. By comparing different samples at different depths and locations, we can understand the change in the brightness of the Sun over time.
According to the paper, there is no longer an accessible location in the solar system to delve into the sun's ancient history.
Source: Science Alert