Study reveals new explanation for Moon\'s half-century magnetic mystery

Rhode Island: Ever since rocks were brought back from the Moon to the Earth, during NASA's Apollo program from 1968 to 1972, an enduring mystery continued to baffle scientists: the Moon's magnetic field - one that rivalled Earth's in strength. But now, the study, published in 'Nature Astronomy', has shown that giant rock formations sinking through the Moon's mantle could have produced the kind of interior convection that generates strong magnetic fields. The processes could have produced intermittently strong magnetic fields for the first billion years of the Moon's history, the researchers said. "Everything that we've thought about how magnetic fields are generated by planetary cores tells us that a body of the Moon's size should not be able to generate a field that's as strong as Earth's," said Alexander Evans, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown and co-author of the study with Sonia Tikoo from Stanford University. The presence of those weak signatures along with the strong ones would give this new idea a big boost, which could finally put the Moon's magnetic mystery to rest.