In the first moments after birth, the Moon possessed an exotic superdense atmosphere of metallic vapors; supersonic winds raged in it, the traces of which could be preserved in the most ancient "seas" of the satellite of the Earth, according to an article posted in the arXiv.org electronic library.
“The atmosphere of the moon was somewhat like a rock star. She had a very violent life story, similar to heavy metal, but she, like the stellar bands, very quickly disintegrated and ended its existence. If we understand what the Moon looked like at the time, we will have good ideas about how the planets live in red dwarfs,”said Prabal Saxena of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, USA.
For the past 30 years, it has been generally accepted that the Moon was formed as a result of the collision of Theia, a protoplanetary body, with the "embryo" of the Earth. The collision led to the release of the matter of Theia and proto-Earth into space, from which the Moon was formed. The theory of the collision of the proto-Earth with a large celestial body explains well the mass of the Moon, the low iron content on it, and other parameters.
However, in such a collision, a significant part of the material that makes up the moon should have come from the hypothetical Theia. In its composition, it differed from the Earth, like most of the celestial bodies of the inner region of the solar system, which includes the terrestrial planets and asteroids. But in fact, the composition of the Earth and the Moon is very similar, up to the same proportion of isotopes of many metals and other elements.
Relatively recently, planetary scientists have proposed a rather exotic solution to the problem - the so-called "yula planet" hypothesis. In accordance with it, the young Earth had to rotate very quickly and at the same time lie on its side, like Uranus, and a collision with Theia should have slowed it down and rotated its axis. Such a scenario, in principle, has the right to life, but it is unlikely, which makes planetary scientists look for other options for the birth of the Moon, for example, as a result of the collision of the Earth with many small objects.
According to Saxena, planetary scientists are interested not only in how the moon was born, but how it looked in the first moments of life. Its appearance at that moment can tell us why there is no atmosphere on the Moon today, when it lost its magnetic field and explain why its “invisible” side for us is noticeably lighter than the one that always “looks” at the Earth.
Saxena and his colleagues created a computer model of the young Moon, which revealed the unusual appearance of the Earth's companion in the distant past. For example, it turned out that the newborn Moon, due to its proximity to the red-hot Earth, was so hot that its atmosphere consisted not of gases, but of metal vapors - calcium, aluminum, iron, magnesium, titanium and other substances. The average temperatures of this "air" exceeded 1700 degrees Celsius on the "earthly" side of the moon.
Due to the fact that on the far side of the Moon the temperature dropped to minus 150 degrees Celsius, powerful supersonic winds arose in it, blowing at a speed of 1000-1700 meters per second. All this made the Moon look like extreme exoplanets discovered in recent years, such as the "diamond planet" 55 Cnc e or the "ruby planet" HAT-P-7b.
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In this form, as the calculations of scientists show, the Moon did not last long - about 400 thousand years, and the first signs of its extinction appeared already 100 years after the birth of the Earth's companion. Its traces, according to planetary scientists, can be hidden in the oldest "seas" of the Moon, giant craters that arose even before this metallic atmosphere and the winds raging in it disappeared.