We all know what the Moon looks like, with its crater covered surface. However, lunar swirls are less obvious to the naked eye and even scientists have long wondered what they were, despite having been discovered way back in the 1600s.
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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.