Lunar coronavirus
A strange thing happened when Earth was gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, scientists claim: The moon got significantly colder.
As described in a recent article published in the journal Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: lettersscientists at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, observed that the moon’s surface temperatures dropped significantly at night at six observation sites on the near side of the moon.
They argue that this ‘abnormal dip’ was caused by a sudden drop in radiation emitted from Earth as human activity plummeted during global lockdowns, increasing the amount of pollution and overall heat our planet releases at night. was limited.
“Our research therefore shows that the moon may have experienced the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown, visualized as an anomalous drop in lunar nighttime surface temperatures during that period,” the scientists concluded in their paper.
The results also indicate that studying the moon’s temperature fluctuations could provide us with a “stable platform to study Earth’s radiation budget and climate change.”
Global Moondemic
During the day, much of the sunlight is reflected back into space by Earth’s atmosphere, while only some of it is absorbed. The moon is also ravaged by radiation from the sun during the day.
But at night the situation is essentially different, because “the moon only receives radiation from the Earth and can therefore influence nighttime surface temperatures.”
Scientists have previously shown that nighttime temperatures can vary depending on the amount of terrestrial radiation released by the Earth.
During the early COVID-19 lockdowns, human activities and associated pollution levels dropped significantly, providing scientists with a unique opportunity to study climate change.
And the effect was so pronounced that we were even able to measure an ‘abnormal dip’ in nighttime temperatures on the moon, hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
That could allow scientists to use the moon’s surface as the perfect testing ground to study the effects of climate change on Earth.
“In this work, we took advantage of a rare and unique opportunity presented by COVID-19 to conduct our research, which may never happen again,” the researchers wrote. “It could also be further substantiated by moon-based observatories in the future, as advocated by some researchers.”
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