The Man in the Moon Was Probably Made By a Magma Plume
It’s a trick you learned as kid. Look at the moon until your brain tricks you into seeing a combination of moon features as a face, the “Man in the Moon.” You probably never thought about why it was there, but the prevailing theory has been that it’s the result of a an asteroid strike. But scientists have recently discovered that the “Man in the Moon,” actually an area known as Procellarum region that’s 1,800 miles wide, was probably not created by an impact, but instead by a huge plume of magma that erupted from inside the moon itself. Resarchers with MIT, the Colorado School of Mines and others have used data from NASA’s GRAIL twin moon probe mission to study the thickness of the moon’s crust and to find gravity anomalies that mark the edge of the region. A high resolution map of the Procellarum made from these findings show its contours aren’t circular, like an asteroid strike would be, but have sharp angles more consistent with giant tension