月球上的冰可能有幾十億年的歷史了

最新研究表明，月球上的冰可能有幾十億年的歷史了

It has long been established that the moon contains significant amounts of ice and water, including frozen water found on the lunar surface last year. Now, a new study suggests that the ice could be billions of years old and come from different sources.

長期以來，人們一直認(rèn)為月球上含有大量的冰和水，包括去年在月球表面發(fā)現(xiàn)的冷凍水?，F(xiàn)在，一項(xiàng)新的研究表明，這些冰可能有數(shù)十億年的歷史，來自不同的來源。

The study, published in the scientific journal Icarus, suggests that some ice could be almost as old as the moon itself. Other ice deposits could be much younger, perhaps put there by comets and asteroids, or even underground volcanic activity.

這項(xiàng)發(fā)表在科學(xué)雜志《伊卡洛斯》(Icarus)上的研究表明，一些冰的年齡可能與月球本身的年齡差不多。其他的冰層可能要年輕得多，可能是彗星和小行星，甚至是地下火山活動(dòng)造成的。

“We quantify the amount of available cold-trapping surface area that is occupied by water ice in order to examine the relationship between the patchiness of ice within each crater and the age of each host crater,” the study’s abstract states.

該研究的摘要稱:“我們量化了水冰所占的可用冷阱表面積，以研究每個(gè)隕石坑內(nèi)冰的碎片和每個(gè)主隕石坑的年齡之間的關(guān)系。”

“The majority of surface ice is contained in old craters [greater than 3.1 billion years], where the majority of cold-trapping area on the pole exists.”

“絕大多數(shù)地表冰都包含在舊隕石坑中(大于31億年)，而南極的大部分冷捕捉區(qū)都存在于這些隕石坑中。”

“Just because the crater is old doesn’t mean that the ice within it is also that old too, but in this case, there’s reason to believe the ice is indeed old,” the researchers said in a statement.

研究人員在一份聲明中說:“僅僅因?yàn)殡E石坑很老并不意味著里面的冰也很老，但在這種情況下，我們有理由相信這些冰確實(shí)很老。”