The Moon Has A Tail - video Dailymotion

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1/2/2025

The tail is invisible to the naked eye but appears on all-sky cameras during every new moon, which Earth wears like a scarf once a month.

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00:00When a comet soars across the sky, twin trails of gas and dust streak behind it.

00:05Now, a new study suggests that the moon may have a similar tail,

00:08but it's only visible once a month when Earth passes directly through it.

00:17In the 1990s, astronomers noticed that the moon has a tail.

00:21It isn't visible to the naked eye, but using a special telescope,

00:24they were able to see the faint orange glow of sodium streaking off of the moon.

00:28This sodium tail comes from lunar soil that gets blasted into space when asteroids hit the moon,

00:34and it's only visible from Earth once a month during a new moon

00:37when the moon sits between Earth and the sun.

00:40When these three bodies are aligned, photons from the sun push that airborne

00:43sodium hundreds of thousands of miles away from the moon.

00:46Earth's gravity then pinches that sodium tail into a long beam that

00:50wraps around our planet and shoots out the other side.

00:53That beam is about 50 times too dim for humans to see with the naked eye,

00:57but when astronomers look at it with the right telescopes,

01:00they see a fuzzy orange spot about five times wider than the full moon.

01:04After a few days, it vanishes.

01:07That fuzzy sodium spot always appears at the same time each month,

01:11but strangely, its brightness is constantly changing.

01:14In a new study published this month in the journal JGR Planets,

01:18astronomers tried to figure out why.

01:20After looking at 14 years worth of lunar photos,

01:22they figured out that the spot tends to appear brighter

01:25when more random meteors are sighted over Earth.

01:28What's the connection?

01:30More meteors over Earth means more asteroids slamming into the surface of the moon,

01:34which doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it like our planet does.

01:38According to the researchers,

01:39these random meteors tend to be larger, faster, and more powerful

01:43than the broken up rocks that are parts of the annual meteor showers

01:47that we see like the Leonods in November.

01:50Bigger meteors mean bigger impacts on the moon,

01:52which means a bigger cloud of sodium flying into space and eventually passing over Earth.

01:57And so, scientists on Earth see a brighter spot when our planet

02:02focuses that cloud into a beam that passes around our planet.

02:06The moon's tail and the beam it creates are both harmless to our planet,

02:09which has a strong atmosphere to protect it from those pesky particles.

02:13So the next time a new moon rises,

02:16take a minute to thank our friend in the sky

02:17for sprinkling us with a little cosmic pixie dust.

02:22Transcribed by ESO. Translated by —

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