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,
00:09but 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,
00:33and it's only visible from Earth once a month during a new moon when the moon sits between Earth and
00:39the sun.
00:39When these three bodies are aligned, photons from the sun push that airborne sodium hundreds of thousands of miles away
00:45from the moon.
00:46Earth's gravity then pinches that sodium tail into a long beam that wraps around our planet and shoots out the
00:52other 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, they see a fuzzy orange spot about five times wider
01:03than the full moon.
01:04After a few days, it vanishes.
01:07That fuzzy sodium spot always appears at the same time each month, but strangely its brightness is constantly changing.
01:14In a new study published this month in the journal JGR Planets, astronomers tried to figure out why.
01:20After looking at 14 years worth of lunar photos, they figured out that the spot tends to appear brighter when
01:26more random meteors are sighted over Earth.
01:28What's the connection?
01:29More 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.
01:37According to the researchers, these random meteors tend to be larger, faster, and more powerful than the broken up rocks
01:44that are parts of the annual meteor showers that we see, like the Leonards in November.
01:50Bigger meteors mean bigger impacts on the moon, which means a bigger cloud of sodium flying into space and eventually
01:56passing over Earth.
01:57And so, scientists on Earth see a brighter spot when our planet focuses that cloud into a beam that passes
02:05around our planet.
02:06The moon's tail and the beam it creates are both harmless to our planet, which has a strong atmosphere to
02:11protect it from those pesky particles.
02:13So the next time a new moon rises, take a minute to thank our friend in the sky for sprinkling
02:18us with a little cosmic pixie dust.
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