{"id":215796,"date":"2025-06-12T06:22:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T11:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/why-the-moon-shimmers-with-shiny-glass-beads"},"modified":"2025-06-12T06:22:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T11:22:06","slug":"why-the-moon-shimmers-with-shiny-glass-beads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/why-the-moon-shimmers-with-shiny-glass-beads","title":{"rendered":"Why the moon shimmers with shiny glass beads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-the-moon-shimmers-with-shiny-glass-beads.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Apollo astronauts didn\u2019t know what they\u2019d find when they explored the surface of the moon, but they certainly didn\u2019t expect to see drifts of tiny, bright orange glass beads glistening among the otherwise monochrome piles of rocks and dust.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/beads\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">beads<\/a>, each less than 1 mm across, formed some 3.3 to 3.6 billion years ago during <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/volcanic+eruptions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">volcanic eruptions<\/a> on the surface of the then-young satellite. \u201cThey\u2019re some of the most amazing extraterrestrial samples we have,\u201d said Ryan Ogliore, an associate professor of physics in Arts &amp; Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, home to a large repository of lunar samples that were returned to Earth. \u201cThe beads are tiny, pristine capsules of the lunar interior.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Using a variety of microscopic analysis techniques not available when the Apollo astronauts first returned samples from the moon, Ogliore and a team of researchers have been able to take a close look at the microscopic mineral deposits on the outside of lunar beads. The unprecedented view of the ancient lunar artifacts was published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S001910352500154X\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Icarus<\/i><\/a>. The investigation was led by Thomas Williams, Stephen Parman and Alberto Saal from Brown University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Apollo astronauts didn\u2019t know what they\u2019d find when they explored the surface of the moon, but they certainly didn\u2019t expect to see drifts of tiny, bright orange glass beads glistening among the otherwise monochrome piles of rocks and dust. The beads, each less than 1 mm across, formed some 3.3 to 3.6 billion years [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}