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The Moon Has A Tail
Live Science
Follow
5/28/2025
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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Tech
Transcript
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00:00
When a comet soars across the sky, twin trails of gas and dust streak behind it.
00:05
Now, a new study suggests that the moon may have a similar tail,
00:09
but it's only visible once a month when Earth passes directly through it.
00:18
In the 1990s, astronomers noticed that the moon has a tail.
00:21
It isn't visible to the naked eye, but using a special telescope,
00:24
they were able to see the faint orange glow of sodium streaking off of the moon.
00:28
This sodium tail comes from lunar soil that gets blasted into space when asteroids hit the moon.
00:34
And it's only visible from Earth once a month during the new moon,
00:37
when the moon sits between Earth and the sun.
00:40
When these three bodies are aligned, photons from the sun push that airborne sodium
00:44
hundreds of thousands of miles away from the moon.
00:47
Earth's gravity then pinches that sodium tail into a long beam that wraps around our planet
00:52
and shoots out the other side.
00:54
That beam is about 50 times too dim for humans to see with the naked eye,
00:57
but when astronomers look at it with the right telescopes,
01:00
they see a fuzzy orange spot about five times wider than the full moon.
01:05
After a few days, it vanishes.
01:07
That fuzzy sodium spot always appears at the same time each month,
01:11
but strangely its brightness is constantly changing.
01:14
In a new study published this month in the journal JGR Planets,
01:18
astronomers tried to figure out why.
01:20
After looking at 14 years worth of lunar photos, they figured out that the spot tends to appear brighter
01:25
when more random meteors are sighted over Earth.
01:28
What's the connection?
01:30
More meteors over Earth means more asteroids slamming into the surface of the moon,
01:34
which doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it like our planet does.
01:37
According to the researchers, these random meteors tend to be larger, faster, and more powerful
01:43
than the broken up rocks that are parts of the annual meteor showers that we see,
01:47
like the Leonards in November.
01:50
Bigger meteors mean bigger impacts on the moon,
01:52
which means a bigger cloud of sodium flying into space and eventually passing over Earth.
01:57
And so scientists on Earth see a brighter spot when our planet focuses that cloud into a beam that passes around our planet.
02:05
The moon's tail and the beam it creates are both harmless to our planet,
02:09
which has a strong atmosphere to protect it from those pesky particles.
02:13
So the next time a new moon rises,
02:15
take a minute to thank our friend in the sky for sprinkling us with a little cosmic pixie dust.
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