Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbomb Here. We sometimes forget that water has a recipe. One atom of oxygen, two atoms of hydrogen. All water was made somehow, and here on Earth. The same water has been knocking around our old planet for billions of years thanks to our water cycle. But water exists in other places too, anywhere oxygen and hydrogen atoms have the
chance to find one another. The trick is, if other objects in space are going to keep their water, they've got to have a way to hold on to it. Not everybody has a fabulous atmosphere like Earth. Chinese researchers have recently discovered that our moon has a vast store of water, probably upwards of three hundred and thirty billion tons of it, all hidden away under and in the
lunar soil. In the March twenty twenty three edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers reported that tiny, rough glass beads holding on to droplets of water can be found all over the Moon. Some of these beads were collected in December of twenty twenty by China's Chang of five, a robotic spacecraft sent to the Moon's surface to collect rock and soil. In collecting these samples, researchers found that the surface of the Moon is uniformly littered with tiny
glass beads. The scientific name for these is microtechtites. These grains of glass measuring less than a millimeter across were created by the meteorites big and small, that are constantly bombarding the Moon's surface, exploding molten chunks of lunar crust far into the air, such as it is a while hanging out in a red hot soil plume, some of the material cools into these tiny silica spheres. While drifting through the thin lunar atmosphere, the beads come into contact
with solar winds. From that name, you might assume that solar winds are pleasantly warm and mild. They're actually relentless blasts of plasma as hot as a million degrees celsius, made up of energized electrons and protons, screaming through space at nine hundred kilometers a second. I usually try to report numbers in both metric and imperial, but suffice it to say in this case that in Imperial this is also hot and fast, and this wind contains, among other things,
hydrogen nuclei. Lunar soil contains some oxygen, and when it combines with the hydrogen in the solar wind, that creates water and tiny bits of this water diffuse into the glass beads before they drop back to the surface of the Moon. But okay, could this water be harvested? In short, yes, the water isn't locked in indefinitely. The researchers suggest that the spheres get covered over lunar dust, where water diffuses in and out of the beads over the course of years,
creating something like a water cycle on the Moon. Releasing the water could easily be done by collecting the spheres, heating them up, and then collecting the resulting water vapor. Collecting the beads might be difficult, but even if you could collect all of them and harvest all of their water, it still wouldn't be enough to support, say, a city
on the Moon. But the beads still interest scientists because they represent relatively ready access to water that might eventually help astronauts in emergency situations and for things such as creating drinking water or making rocket fuel. Today's episode is based on the article Moon's glass beads hold billions of tons of water on how stuffworks dot com, written by Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with hostufforks dot com and is produced by
Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.