00:00This is the moon, something we can all see nearly every night shining brightly in the
00:08sky.
00:09However, these lunar swirls are less obvious to the naked eye, and even scientists have
00:12long wondered what they were, despite having been discovered way back in the 1600s.
00:17However, a new study posits an explanation for one of these swirls specifically, called
00:21the Reiner Gamma Swirl.
00:23The moon no longer has a central magnetic field and magnetosphere, however researchers
00:27now say that it must have small localized magnetic fields, and that could have caused
00:31these swirls.
00:32They say that when the sun's rays hit the lunar surface, these many magnetic fields
00:36protect some parts, but not others.
00:38This causes a chemical reaction over time, producing these iconic splotches of grey,
00:43and well, lighter grey.
00:45Still, the cause of these isolated magnetic fields is still a bit of a mystery.
00:49With the researchers writing, impacts could cause these types of magnetic anomalies,
00:52but there are some swirls where we're not sure how an impact could create that shape
00:56and that size of thing, with the study outlining how it could be that subsurface lava could
01:01have cooled slowly in a magnetic field, creating these magnetic anomalies on the surface.
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