Lunar Regolith vs Earth Soil: Two Worlds in Dust

Lunar regolith vs earth soil reveals how water, life, impacts, and vacuum shape two worlds from shared elements.

Lunar Regolith: The Moon's Ancient Chronicle Written in Dust 🌙

Explore lunar regolith: the Moon's ancient dust that holds billions of years of cosmic history, from Apollo discoveries to future possibilities.

Blue Ghost Mission 1 - Lunar Surface Shadow Selfie

Blue Ghost Mission 1 - Lunar PlanetVac on the Moon

LEGO Bricks Printed out of Space Dust

There have been many proposals for building structures on the Moon out of lunar regolith. But here’s an idea sure to resonate with creators, mechanical tinkerers, model builders and the kid inside us all. What about using actual LEGO bricks? Researchers ground up a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite and used the dust to 3D print LEGO-style space … Continue reading "LEGO Bricks Printed out of Space Dust"

Do we Owe our Existence to Gravitational Waves?

Two heavy elements essential to human biology are thought to have been produced by the astrophysical $r$-process, which occurs in neutron-rich environments: iodine is a constituent of thyroid hormones that affect many physiological processes including growth and development, body temperature and heart rate, and bromine is essential for tissue development and architecture. Collisions of neutron stars (kilonovae) have been identified as sources of $r$-process elements including tellurium, which is adjacent to iodine in the periodic table, and lanthanides. Neutron-star collisions arise from energy loss due to gravitational-wave emission from binary systems, leading us to suggest that gravitational waves have played a key role in enabling human life by producing iodine and bromine. We propose probing this proposal by searching in lunar material for live $^{129}$I deposited by a recent nearby kilonova explosion.