Buried under the largest, oldest crater on the moon, scientists have discovered an enormous mass of dense material, possibly the remains of the asteroid that formed the crater some 4 billion years ago.
Astronomers led by Peter B. James from Baylor University discovered the hidden feature by combining data from NASA’s GRAIL lunar orbiter mission and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at where regions of high gravity — and therefore mass — overlap with surface features like craters. They found a giant mass weighing down the floor of the South Pole-Aitken basin by more than a half mile.
“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected,” James said in a press release.
James and his colleagues suggest that one possible explanation for the underground material is that it’s the remains ...
