Apollo 17 samples yield fresh insights 49 years after mission left the Moon

Humans haven't been on the Moon for 49 years but samples they took continue to provide new discoveries. New analysis of a rock sample taken during Apollo 17, which touched down in late 1972, suggest the history of the Moon is more complex than previously thought, according to authors of a report in Nature Communications. …

[Ian Johnston]

Rapid (adj): Geological - taking 20 million years.

[Joe W]

yeah, totally weird. I got used to it, eventually, sorta-kinda.

What still confuses me (a bit - got used to it, kinda-sorta) is their insistence to plot data with the time running in reverse from right being "the past" to left being "now", for a given value of "now", (or bottom to top looks... weird), and the use of BP and cal.BP (and whatever else there is).

[Allan George Dyer]

So analysing the samples in 49 years is absolutely lightning fast!

[Francis Boyle]

For a cosmologist

that's practically instantaneous.

[ravenviz]

Re: For a cosmologist

Albeit 1 second on that time scale is still 30 orders of magnitude larger than the Planck time.

[Phones Sheridan]

"Earlier estimates of a 100-million-year cooling duration had prompted debate for 45 years."

If they can get it to under 6 days, then it's time to start taking the bible seriously!

[Anonymous Coward]

100 million years is only 5 days if you are God.

[Paul Crawford]

Even less if you are Satan

[Arthur the cat]

Or travelling at (1-10^-20)(*) of the speed of light. Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

(*) Approximately.

[Version 1.0]

There's a lesson here

We are always running around these days saying that we KNOW what happened - but all the time we're finding out that we were wrong when new evidence shows up that we had total missed or never even looked for previously. We live in a world where we say, "There's no evidence that this happened" ... but that usually means that there's no evidence that it didn't happen either - someone's imagination is not evidence.

Science doesn't make these mistakes, science means people look at the evidence and then think about what might have happened but consider all the possibilities as only potentials. Politics and Social Media are just people running around and worried about their popularity - I can remember feeling like that when I was 3 years old, I think now that we all need to grow up.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: There's a lesson here

Agree. The concept 'know' is tied to the evidence available at the time, and subject to change.

[Arthur the cat]

troctolite

The OED tells me this comes from the Greek for sea fish(*) stone. I suppose that goes with the Maria.

(*) Although usually translated as "trout", which is weird as trout are freshwater fish.

[Muscleguy]

Re: troctolite

There are lots of sorts of fish around the world called ‘sea trout’ due to their physical resembles or eating resemblance. The kahawai in NZ was known as such before the Maori name took precedence.