{"id":21550,"date":"2025-02-04T21:02:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T22:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21550"},"modified":"2025-02-04T22:26:20","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T22:26:20","slug":"grand-canyons-on-the-moon-were-made-in-a-matter-of-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21550","title":{"rendered":"Grand Canyons on the Moon Were Made in a Matter of Minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Scientists proposed an explanation for the formation of Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck near the lunar south pole, which are each about the size of Earth\u2019s Grand Canyon.<\/p>\n

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Two canyons near the south pole of the moon rival the Grand Canyon, both in depth and length.<\/p>\n

Unlike the sinuous chasm in Arizona, the two lunar canyons, known as Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck, are straight, as if the crust of the moon had been cut by a knife.<\/p>\n

And unlike the Grand Canyon, carved over millions of years by the flow of the Colorado River, Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck formed in just minutes after a 15-mile-wide meteor struck the moon some 3.8 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

Indeed, carving these vast lunar trenches took less time than it might take you to bake a frozen pizza.<\/p>\n

The impact, comparable to the one that smashed into the Earth 66 million years ago and killed the dinosaurs<\/a>, punched up to 15 miles into the crust and excavated a crater about 200 miles wide. In the process, it ejected fusillades of giant rocks \u2014 what planetary scientists call ejecta rays \u2014 that crashed down in staccato succession to create the canyons, which are more than 1.5 miles deep and more than 165 miles long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThey truly are extraordinary in scale,\u201d said David Kring, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. \u201cThese things were carved in less than 10 minutes when the Grand Canyon took 5 to 6 million years to carve. I mean that illustrates the energy of an impact event.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a new analysis, Dr. Kring and his colleagues, Danielle Kallenborn and Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, constructed a mathematical model to describe how the canyons formed in a rain of giant rocks. They used photographs taken by NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which showed a string of craters along the canyons, to calculate the speed and direction of the debris.<\/p>\n

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Scientists proposed an explanation for the formation of Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck near the lunar south pole, which are each about the size of Earth\u2019s Grand Canyon.Two canyons near the south pole of the moon rival the Grand Canyon, both in depth and length.Unlike the sinuous chasm in Arizona, the two lunar canyons, known as Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck, are straight, as if the crust of the moon had been cut by a knife.And unlike the Grand Canyon, carved over millions of years by the flow of the Colorado River, Vallis Schr\u00f6dinger and Vallis Planck formed in just minutes after a 15-mile-wide meteor struck the moon some 3.8 billion years ago.Indeed, carving these vast lunar trenches took less time than it might take you to bake a frozen pizza.The impact, comparable to the one that smashed into the Earth 66 million years ago and killed the dinosaurs, punched up to 15 miles into the crust and excavated a crater about 200 miles wide. In the process, it ejected fusillades of giant rocks \u2014 what planetary scientists call ejecta rays \u2014 that crashed down in staccato succession to create the canyons, which are more than 1.5 miles deep and more than 165 miles long.\u201cThey truly are extraordinary in scale,\u201d said David Kring, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. \u201cThese things were carved in less than 10 minutes when the Grand Canyon took 5 to 6 million years to carve. I mean that illustrates the energy of an impact event.\u201dIn a new analysis, Dr. Kring and his colleagues, Danielle Kallenborn and Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, constructed a mathematical model to describe how the canyons formed in a rain of giant rocks. They used photographs taken by NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which showed a string of craters along the canyons, to calculate the speed and direction of the debris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21552,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21553,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21550\/revisions\/21553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}