Scientists announced in early July that an enormous, heat-emitting blob is currently sitting on the far side of the moon.
Though this is not the first time humans have stumbled upon the bizarre blob of heat-emitting granite, according to National Geographic, the news has once again surprised the scientific community. “We have discovered extra heat coming out of the ground at a location on the Moon believed to be a long dead volcano which last erupted over 3.5 billion years ago,” lead researcher Matt Siegler wrote in a press release regarding the discovery.
“It’s around 50km across, and the only solution that we can think of which produces that much heat is a large body of granite, a rock which forms when a magma body – the unerupted lava – below a volcano cools. Granite has high concentrations of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium compared to other rocks in the lunar crust, causing the heating we can sense at the lunar surface,” he continued. (RELATED: A Moon In Our Solar System Has All The Ingredients To Host Life)
The blob was discovered by an international team of reseaarchers working with NASA. It was an unexpected discovery, as granite is almost completely absent in our known solar system except for here on Earth, the team wrote in Nature.
While this is all well and good, it is going to take a heck of a lot more evidence to convince me that the moon isn’t hollow. Just check out this video, and I’m sure you’ll feel exactly the same way: