{"id":225991,"date":"2025-11-27T00:23:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T06:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/scientists-cracked-open-a-lunar-rock-and-found-a-huge-surprise"},"modified":"2025-11-27T00:23:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T06:23:15","slug":"scientists-cracked-open-a-lunar-rock-and-found-a-huge-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/scientists-cracked-open-a-lunar-rock-and-found-a-huge-surprise","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Cracked Open a Lunar Rock And Found a Huge Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-cracked-open-a-lunar-rock-and-found-a-huge-surprise.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A tiny sample of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/moon\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_self\">the Moon<\/a> locked away for more than 50 years turns out to have been hiding an astronomical secret.<\/p>\n<p>In specks of troilite dust collected by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission\/apollo-17\/\">Apollo 17 in 1972<\/a>, scientists have found material that may be as old \u2013 or even older \u2013 than the Moon itself, a 4.5-billion-year-old relic of the early Solar System.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy first thought was, \u2018Holy shmolies, that can\u2019t be right,\u2019\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brown.edu\/news\/2025-10-06\/sulfur-isotopes-apollo-samples\">says planetary scientist James Dottin<\/a> of Brown University in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A tiny sample of the Moon locked away for more than 50 years turns out to have been hiding an astronomical secret. In specks of troilite dust collected by Apollo 17 in 1972, scientists have found material that may be as old \u2013 or even older \u2013 than the Moon itself, a 4.5-billion-year-old relic of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225991","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=225991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}