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back to article Mystery of MAGNETIC ROCKS FOUND ON MOON cracked

Scientists say they may finally have cracked a long-standing boffinry conundrum – the mystery of why it is that the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts of the 1960s and '70s are magnetic. The Moon, unlike the Earth, has no global magnetic field – a compass would not work on the lunar surface – and so its rocks …

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  1. Filippo Silver badge

    Aha! Finally, a good reason to exploit tidal power - stabilizing the lunar orbit!

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    1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Not really

      Extracting energy from the tides could theoretically increase the tidal friction which is drawing rotational energy away from the Earth-Moon system. This would make the moon recede faster and the earth's rotation slow down more quickly. The process stops when 1 day = 1 month = 50x24 hours (if I recall correctly).

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Spinning a Dynamo?

    More like a Magneto I would have thought. Correct me if I'm wrong

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    1. Grease Monkey Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      If we're being pedantic (we are aren't we?) then a magneto is a type of dynamo. The word dynamo being a generic term for a DC electrical generator. Although a lot of so called dynamos fitted to bicycles are actually alternators. Although you are right in so far as a magneto uses a permanent magnet where a dynamo describes a device which uses either a permanent magnet or a commutator.

      </PEDANT>

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Human Miliband

    "The Moon is even today slowly receding outward from planet Earth"

    Rumour has it that David Miliband will bash David Cameron for this during the next PMQs. It's only a rumour because no one's going to notice him say it to make it fact.

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  4. thehealer

    Dynamo? Really?

    And yet, the Earth's core (and the molten core of the paleo moon if there was one) is many times hotter than the Curie temperature of all known magnetic materials. Therefore, there can be no magnetism at the Earth's core (and if there were, Doug McClure would've found it).

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  5. Rob Dobs
    Paris Hilton

    so does this mean?

    that magnetization of rocks will last for billions of years?

    Why do magnets on Earth seem to wear out after a while? Is it all the magnetic charge from the Earth itself?

    Paris, because I feel kinda of stupid for not knowing the answer, and even dumber for asking here and not just looking it up :-)

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    1. perlcat
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Kudos to you!

      for asking how magnets work.

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      1. TimeMaster T
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        An answer is a reply,

        but a reply is not always an answer.

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  6. Richard Wharram

    Magnetic Anomoly ?

    Back to the alien artifacts article I think.

    My God. It's full of crap.

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  7. Tom 13

    I'm not sure that really helps them any.

    You need sudden cooling to fix the magnetism and their mechanism would seem to have slow cooling which ought to allow time for the magnetic alignment to drift.

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  8. Anonymous Coward 15
    Alien

    That's

    no moon...

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh Dear #ScienceFail

    “The further out the Moon moves, the slower the stirring, and at a certain point the lunar dynamo shuts off,” says Dwyer.

    The "stirring" is not proportional to distance as he infers but instead to the relative spin. There is no stirring because the Moon is now Tidally Locked by the Earth, and this can occur at any distance!

    Which is better Dwyer or Wikipedia? well this time its the wiki wins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Which raises the question:

    f'ing magnets, how do they work?

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    1. Rob Dobs
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      It seems pretty basic

      Science seems to say that its easily explainable if the electrons were moving faster than the speed of light, thanks to Einstein this is thrown out the window.

      My explanation: magnets are objects who's electrons are capable of moving faster than the speed of light, and Einsteins theories are flawed.

      We only ignore this obvious answer because it doesn't "fit" with the general theory.

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Could it be from sitting beside another magnet for 5 billion year' s ( Earth )

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    1. Stratman
      Reply Icon

      Or could it be the journey back to Earth magnetised them, as they moved through our magnetic field?

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  12. YARR
    Boffin

    Age of surface rocks?

    Given that since the Earth was formed (after the Lunar impact) it has been hit by enough asteroids to form it's oceans and more, would this not mean that for a body like the moon with no volcanism or continental drift, that the entire surface down to a depth of perhaps several kilometers, would be formed from material acquired from asteroid impacts?

    Hence, would any magnetism in the surface rocks not be attributable to a more recent phenomena?

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  13. Mediocrates
    Trollface

    They were magnetized in 1945

    When the Nazis traveled to the dark side of the moon from their secret base in Antarctica.

    http://www.ironsky.net/

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  14. Hairy Airey
    FAIL

    Moon receding too quickly

    The rate of recession of the moon is such that at a linear rate it would have been touching the earth 5 billion years ago. Realistically it would have been moving away faster to begin with and slow down. The moon is probably about 2 billion years old at best.

    Just one of the reasons that I cannot mathematically accept the theory of evolution. The other reason is the low global population. Had mankind been around for millions of years the population should now be in the trillions.

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    1. thehealer
      Reply Icon

      ?

      What has mathematics got to do with the theory of evolution? Species mutate with every single generation, that's biology, it's got nothing to do with mathematics. Basing human population on some exponential mathematical formula is just plain daft; infant mortality has better than halved over the last 30 years alone, never mind the last 200,000. And that's without factoring recent developments like medicine and dentistry. Perhaps no-one dies in Mathworld?

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Exactly...

      because its well known that it was ancient hominids that invented medicine and penicillin and hygiene...and all the things that prevent child mortality and have increased the survival rate of the population...

      Stop being Daft. think before you type.

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    3. Allan George Dyer
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Troll alert (do I get a prize?)

      Hairy Airey is definitely a bit out of touch with reality, and can't have read Darwin's book. For most of recorded history, human population has been controlled by a variety of diseases and famines, plus frequent wars. Infant mortality was particularly high.

      Further in the past, additional factors in population control no doubt included being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers and many other extinct predators, though, far enough back, the ancestor being eaten would not be human.

      One of the key observations behind Darwin's idea is exactly what Hairy fails to understand - individuals of every species produce greater than replacement numbers of young, yet we are not overrun with rabbits, or any other species because most die before they reach reproductive age. Which ones live long enough to reproduce? The answer is pretty famous.

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  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why is this theory necessary?

    Computer modelling has shown that the moon's size, orbit, strata and make up can all be best explained by a large object impacting the earth. The impact as shown strips the earth's surface which is ejected into space and eventually forms the moon.

    As a result of this it would seem fairly logical that some rocks that had previously made up the surface of the earth would end up laying on the surface of the moon as they get collected up by the moon's orbit.

    Seems much more plausible to me than needing to give the moon an active core generating a magnetic field under temporary conditions.

    Even if you don't accept the impact lunar creation theory, this new theory does nothing to address or suggest how the moon came to be there. It just appears, fully formed with a molten core? Very convenient.

    Now, I'm off to make up some improbable theories. It's obviously dead easy to get good funding for bad research these days and I could do with a few quid!

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