China’s Lunar Rock Samples Show Lava Flowed on the Moon 2 Billion Years Ago

upstart writes:

China's lunar rock samples show lava flowed on the moon 2 billion years ago:

Lava oozed across the moon's surface just 2 billion years ago, bits of lunar rocks retrieved by China's Chang'e-5 mission reveal.

A chemical analysis of the volcanic rocks confirms that the moon remained volcanically active far longer that its size would suggest possible, researchers report online October 7 in Science.

Chang'e-5 is the first mission to retrieve lunar rocks and return them to Earth in over 40 years (SN: 12/1/20). An international group of researchers found that the rocks formed 2 billion years ago, around when multicellular life first evolved on Earth. That makes them the youngest moon rocks ever collected, says study coauthor Carolyn Crow, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The moon formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Lunar rocks from the Apollo and Soviet missions of the late 1960s and 70s revealed that volcanism on the moon was commonplace for the first billion or so years of its existence, with flows lasting for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years.

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