When Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, preparing to face a lifeless wasteland, they were taken aback to find the surface covered in gleaming orange glass beads. Tiny grains, about as small as a pencil tip, are left over from giant volcanic eruptions more than 3.5 billion years ago. Those raindrop-shaped beads were made from molten droplets that spouted during blazing explosions and then cooled in the Moon’s frigid vacuum. Such glass beads are safe in the storms of the airless, sheltered moon. They have been reconsidered yet again with forward-leaning tools, and with them come brightly dramatised, violent graphical bullet points of a world that once was tropical and full of colour.

Moon’s Ancient Glass Beads Reveal Explosive Volcanic Past and Clues to Lunar Interior Evolution

As per a recent analysis published in Universe Today, a team of scientists from Washington University and elsewhere employed high-resolution electron microscopy and ion beam techniques to analyse the mineral content of Apollo-era samples that contain a well-preserved record of lunar volcanic eruptions and associated eruption style, temperature, and chemical environment.

The beads range in colour from shiny black to matte dull red and vibrant orange, and they show differing eruption and magma source conditions on the moon’s surface. Some papers demonstrate rapid lava cooling, while others indicate so-called magma residence time. The surfaces of the beads contain isotopic data, and that information holds clues to the Moon’s molten interior, dating 3.3-3.6 billion years ago, as it first started to develop.

It’s because each bead is a testimony not to a dramatic volcanic event that took place on the Moon, but with each bead, there’s a journal entry written about that event, long ago, back in the days of our lunar volcanologists. “If we can date when that volcanism happened, we can start to assemble the history of what the moon was oriented like, the history of it and what was happening,” he says, “not just in the moon, but it has implications for planetary history in general; we can do this elsewhere in the solar system.

The proposed instruments for NASA’s Artemis missions will continue to search the Moon and discover more bead samples and other sampling varieties and enable a better understanding of the lunar volcanic record, rewriting lunar geology and transforming scientific views of the history of the cosmos.

Astronomers have at last found the universe’s missing ordinary matter, the particles that formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang and that account for everything we see around us, from the Earth to the stars. Some fast radio bursts (FRBs), vanishingly fast, hugely energetic signals from deep space, have allowed scientists to finally detect some of the missing normal matter that had eluded them for decades. 

Fast Radio Bursts Reveal Hidden Baryonic Matter Spread Across Vast Intergalactic Cosmic Fog

According to a mission update published in Nature Astronomy, researchers from Caltech and the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics looked at 69 FRBs, some of which travelled up to 9.1 billion light-years, to find baryonic matter that is spread out in the space between galaxies. Using instruments like Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array and Australia’s ASKAP helped the research locate and home in on the FRBs, which are too small for regular sensors to detect.

So there is a type of missing matter that has been found: It is made of particles, of course, but we interact with those particles only secondhand, via the almost unimaginably infrequent creative collision. FRBs, the cosmic headlights, have validated this by revealing baryonic matter — 76 percent in the inter­galactic, 15 percent in galactic haloes, and 9 percent within galaxies — to be distributed much more uniformly in space compared to dark matter.

The first observational evidence of this distribution that they predicted has been obtained, indicating that the FRBs can be used as a “smart tool” to probe the large-scale structure and the evolution history of the universe. This light distortion seen from these bursts is now a new tool to explore the faraway areas in space.

Caltech’s DSA-2000 radio array could detect more than 10,000 FRBs every year, which would significantly advance the field of radio astronomy. This could provide a way to better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and to more accurately measure cosmic structures. Every new FRB is a new chance to fill in the map of the unknown universe.

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