Creation Moment 7/16/2020 - That Lesser Light

And God made ...and the lesser light to rule the night... Genesis 1:16

"The theories for the origin of the moon and its subsequent evolution unravel when you try to stuff long ages into a young body.
 
There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case.

Here are some recent articles about the moon, with “surprise effects” quoted.
The moon isn’t ‘dead’: Ridges on lunar surface show signs of recent tectonic activity (Space.com, 4 May 2020).
Ridges observed with little regolith on top cannot be explained by ancient volcanism. “Newly discovered ridges on the moon’s surface are leading scientists to think that the moon might have an active tectonic system.” Five times the article says that active tectonic movements could still be occurring today.

“There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case,” Shultz said in the same statement. “From this paper, it appears that the moon may still be creaking and cracking — potentially in the present day — and we can see the evidence on these ridges."

The moon is emitting carbon, raising questions about how it was formed (New Scientist, 6 May 2020). Volatile elements containing carbon were supposed to be long gone by now, this article says, but there’s more present than can be accumulated from known sources.

The researchers compared the moon’s carbon emissions with estimates of the carbon supplied by two external sources – the solar wind, and collisions with micrometeoroids – and found they didn’t match up. “The emission is a bit larger than the supply from outer space,” says Yokota.

 New evidence shows giant meteorite impacts formed parts of the Moon’s crust (Phys.org 11 May 2020, from the Royal Ontario Museum). The idea that additional impacts mixed up the material in the lunar crust sounds like special pleading. Tiny grains from Apollo 17 samples show crystals that only could have formed at very high temperatures:

The scientists conducted new research of a unique rock collected by NASA astronauts during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission to the Moon. They found it contains mineralogical evidence that it formed at incredibly high temperatures (in excess of 2300 °C/ 4300 °F) that can only be achieved by the melting of the outer layer of a planet in a large impact event.

And so this team contradicts the prior team that imagined “milder temperatures” when it formed. The Royal Ontario scientists performed divination on crystals to visualize a storm of impacts mixing the crustal rocks.

“By first looking at this rock, I was amazed by how differently the minerals look compared to other Apollo 17

samples,” says Dr. Ana Cernok, Hatch Postdoctoral Fellow at the ROM and co-author of the study. “Although smaller than a millimetre, the baddeleyite grain that caught our attention was the largest one I have ever seen in Apollo samples. This small grain is still holding the evidence for formation of an impact basin that was hundreds of kilometres in diameter. This is significant, because we do not see any evidence of these old impacts on Earth.”

Radar Points to Moon Being More Metallic Than Researchers Thought (NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, 1 July 2020). Planetary scientists believe that the bulk composition of the Earth and Moon are largely similar, but higher levels of titanium and iron than expected have been found in the largest craters near the poles. That doesn’t fit the favored theory of a giant impact. Now they don’t know if the Earth contributed those metals or the impactor did – or, maybe neither did.

• “The LRO mission and its radar instrument continue to surprise us with new insights about the origins and complexity of our nearest neighbor,” a lead LRO scientist says.
• “It was a surprising relationship that we had no reason to believe would exist,” another said of the dielectric constant that increased with crater diameter, but then leveled off.
• “This exciting result from Mini-RF shows that even after 11 years in operation at the Moon, we are still making new discoveries about the ancient history of our nearest neighbor,” another LRO scientist named Noah comments.
• “It really raises the question of what this means for our previous formation hypotheses,” another says.

A long-lived magma ocean on a young Moon (Maurice and four others, Science Advances, 10 July 2020). After asserting the standard Giant Impact model in the Abstract, this paper presents problems: a “long-lived magma ocean” on a “young moon.” But this is how secular scientists talk about long-ago events that nobody witnessed: bluffing certitude followed by admission of poor evidence.

A giant impact onto Earth led to the formation of the Moon, resulted in a lunar magma ocean (LMO), and initiated the last event of core segregation on Earth. However, the timing and temporal link of these events remain uncertain.

Want to see some of the uncertainty? In the paper, they say,

The LMO solidification time scale of up to ~200 Ma

inferred from our model seems inconsistent with the chronology of LMO products. Crystallization ages for ferroan anorthosites (FANs), representing the LMO’s flotation crust, range from ~100 to ~200 Ma after the beginning of the solar system. However, this range may not reflect true differences in formation ages, because some of these ages have large uncertainties and different chronometers have not yielded concordant results.

And yet they end up claiming that all the data converge on the consensus age of 4.4 billion years for the moon! Can anybody believe these guys? They pick and choose the evidences that give them the result they already believed in. That is not good science. What about the evidences shown above for recent tectonic activity and carbon emissions going on today? And yet today, all the popular science news sites like Phys.org are parroting their press release that the moon is “younger than thought” by (wow) 4.425 billion years instead of 4.51 billion years – as if it is even scientifically possible to calculate such a thing to four significant figures. What chutzpah!"
CEH