In a close study of the mysterious features known as “lunar vortices” that appear on the surface of the Moon, scientists have confirmed that at least two of them are related to its terrain.
A scientific magazine reported that this evidence could help scientists figure out the causes of these bright wrinkles appearing on the moon, the origin of which is still far from being explained.
“The legal explanation for lunar vortices is that the terrain has no effect on the location or shape of the vortex,” said planetary scientist John Weyrich of the Planetary Science Institute.
A team led by planetary scientist Deborah Domingo of the Planetary Science Institute found that “in the vortex in a region known as the Mare Ingenie, the bright lines are 2 to 3 meters (6.6 to 9.8 feet) lower than the dark lanes between them.”
Finding this “vortex” once is interesting, but not enough to determine the connection. So Weirich and his colleagues investigated another vortex, known as Reiner gamma. They took data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s camera and processed it using a suite that included machine learning to extract the surface topography at high resolution.
Their results were similar to those seen in the vortex, which was seen in the Mare Ingenie area.
“In this paper we studied Reiner gamma, and found that the bright areas are about 4 meters (13 feet) lower than the dark areas,” Weyrich said.
He continued: “It is not that simple because the bright areas are uniformly smaller than the dark areas. If this were the case, it would be easy to prove this relationship between the terrain and the vortex by comparing the height map to the image of the vortex. Instead, this relationship only appears when we compare The average height of the bright areas and the average height of the dark areas.
“There are many hypotheses about their formation process,” Weirich added. “Each hypothesis has observations that support it, but there are also other observations that contradict it.”
Weyrich concluded, saying: “Because there is no complete understanding of how these vortices form, we do not fully understand the story they can tell us about the Moon. Their formation could involve a set of processes that are well understood and interacting together, or are currently unknown. The objects or “Unusual phenomena are sometimes the key to deeper knowledge, which is why lunar vortices are so interesting.”
