Researchers have developed a model that accounts for chaotic lunar impact gardening, enabling scientists to use lunar regolith to trace supernova history back over 100 million years.
What can lunar regolith (often mistakenly called “soil”) teach scientists about the universe’s history? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Letters hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated how lunar regolith could be used to study supernova explosions. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for studying the cosmos aside from telescopic observations and data.
For the study, the researchers addressed a longstanding conundrum in lunar science called “impact gardening”, which involves the natural mixing of the lunar regolith during impact strikes, even micrometeorites. As a result, using the lunar regolith to study phenomena like the solar or cosmic radiation becomes scrambles since this mixture contains “information” from a variety of time periods. However, the researchers introduced a new model using Apollo lunar regolith samples by reducing the gardening “noise” within the sample.
In the end, the researchers successfully identified the depth of Iron-60, Plutonium-244, Iodine-129, Hafnium-182, and Curium-247, which are known fingerprints of supernova explosions. The team compared this new model with known supernova impacts on Earth and used that data to create a forward-looking model to ascertain how the lunar regolith would store this information.








