New support for the TGD based explanation for the origin of Moon

I have learned that the Moon is a rather mysterious object. The origin of the Moon is a mystery although the fact that its composition is the same as that of Earth gives hints; Moon is receding from us (cosmic recession velocity is 78 per cent of this velocity, which suggests that surplus recession velocity is due to the explosion) (see this) it seems that the Moon has effectively turned inside out; the faces of the Moon are very different; the latest mystery that I learned of, are the magnetic anomalies of the Moon. The TGD based view of the origin of the Moon combined with the TGD view of magnetic fields generalizing the Maxwellian view explains all these mysterious looking findings.

The magnetic field of the Moon (see the Wikipedia article) is mysterious. There are two ScienceAlert articles about the topic (see this and this). There is an article by Krawzynksi et al with the title "Possibility of Lunar Crustal Magnatism Producing Strong Crustal Magnetism" to be referred as Ketal (see this). The article by Hemingway and Tikoo with the title "Lunar Swirl Morphology Constrains the Geometry, Magnetization, and Origins of Lunar Magnetic Anomalies" to be referred as HT (see this) considers a model for the origin local magnetic anomalies of the Moon manifesting themselves as lunar swirls.

1. The magnetic anomalies of the Moon

1. The Moon has no global magnetic field but there are local rather strong magnetic fields. What puts bells ringing is that their ancient strengths according to HT are of the same order of magnitude as the strength of the Earth's magnetic field with a nominal value of B_E≈ .5 Gauss. Note that also Mars lacks long range magnetic field but has similar local anomalies so that Martian auroras are possible. The mechanism causing these fields might be the same.
2. The crustal fields are a surface phenomenon and it is implausible that they could be caused by the rotation of plasma in the core of the Moon. The crustal magnetic fields seem to be associated with the lunar swirls, which are light-colored and therefore reflecting regions observed already at the 16^th century. Reiner Gamma is a classical example of a lunar swirl illustrated by Fig 1. of this. The origin of the swirlds is a mystery and several mechanisms have been proposed besides the crustal magnetism.
3. Since Moon does not have a global magnetic field shielding it from the solar wind and cosmic rays, weathering is expected to occur and change the chemistry of the surface so that it becomes dark colored and ceases to be reflective. In lunar maria this darkening has been indeed observed. The lunar swirls are an exception and a possible explanation is that they involve a relatively strong local magnetic field, which does the same as the magnetic field of Earth, and shields them from the weathering effects. It is known that the swirls are accompanied by magnetic fields much stronger than might be expected. What is interesting is that the opposite face of the Moon is mostly light-colored. Does this mean that there is a global magnetic field taking care of the shielding.

The article HT discusses a mechanism for how exceptionally strong magnetization could be associated with the vertical lava tubes and what are called dikes. The name indicates that the dikes are parallel to the surface.

1. The radar evidence indicates that the surface of the Moon once contained a molten rock. This suggest a period of high temperature and volcanic activity billions of years ago. Using a model of lava cooling rates Krawczynski and his colleagues have examined how a titanium-iron oxide, a mineral known as ilmenite - abundant on the Moon and commonly found in volcanic rock - could have produced a magnetization. Their experiments demonstrate that under the right conditions, the slow cooling of ilmenite can stimulate grains of metallic iron and iron nickel alloys within the Moon's crust and upper mantle to produce a powerful magnetic field explaining the swirls.
2. The paleomagnetic analysis of the Apollo samples suggests that there was a global magnetic field during period ≈ 3.85-3.56 Ga (the conjectured Theia event would have occurred ≈ 4.5 Ga ago), which would have reached intensities .78+/- .43 Gauss. The order of magnitude for this field is the same as that for the Earth's recent magnetic field. At the landing site of Apollo 16 magnetic fields as strong as .327 × 10^-3 Gauss were detected. A further analysis suggests the possibility of crustal fields of order 10^-2 Gauss to be compared with the Earth's magnetic field of .5 Gauss.
3. The lunar swirls consist of bright and dark surface markings alternating in a scale of 1-5 km. If their origin is magnetic, also the crustal magnetic fields must vary in the same scale. The associated source structures, modellable as magnetic dipoles, should have the same length scale. The restricted volume of the source bodies should imply strong magnetization. 300 nT crustal fields (.3 × 10^-2 Gauss) are necessary to produce the swirl markings. The required rock magnetization would be higher than .5 A/m (note that 1 A/m corresponds to about 1.25× 10^-2 Gauss).

   The model assumes that below the surface there are vertical magnetic dipoles serving as sources of the local magnetic field. The swirls as light regions would be above the dipoles generating a vertical magnetic field. In the dark regions, the magnetic field would be weak and approximately tangential due the absence of magnetization.

4. A mechanism is needed to enhance the magnetization carrying capacity of the rocks. The proposal is that a heating associated with the magmatic activity would have thermodynamically altered the host rocks making possible magnetizations, which are by an order of magnitude stronger than those associated with the lunar mare basalts (the existence of which suggets that the surface was once in a magma state). The slow cooling would have enhanced the metal content of the rocks and magnetization would have formed a stable record of the ancient global magnetic field of the Moon.

2. The TGD based model for the magnetic field of the Moon

The above picture would conform with the TGD based model in which the face of the Moon opposite to us corresponds to the bottom of the ancient Earth's crust. It could have been at high enough temperature at the time of the explosion producing the Moon. The volcanic activity would have occurred in the Earth's crust and magnetization would be inherited from that period.

One can however wonder how the magnetized structures could have survived for such a long time. The magnetic fields generated by macroscopic currents in the core are unstable and their maintenance in the standard electrodynamics is a mystery to which TGD suggests a solution in terms of the monopole flux contribution of about 2B_E/5 to the Earth's magnetic field which is topologically stable (see this). If the TGD explanation for the origin of the Moon is correct, these stable monopole fluxes assignable with the ancient crust of the Earth should be present also in the recent Moon and could cause a strong magnetization.

The mysterious findings could be indeed understood in the TGD based model for the birth of the Moon as being due to an explosion throwing out the crust of Earth as a spherical shell which condensed to form the Moon.

1. The TGD based model for the magnetic field of the Earth (see this) predicts that the Earth's magnetic field is the sum of a Maxwellian contribution and monopole contribution, which is topologically stable. This part corresponds to monopole flux tubes reflecting the nontrivial topology of CP₂. The monopole flux tubes have a closed 2-surface as a cross section and, unlike ordinary Maxwellian magnetic fields, the monopole part requires no currents to generate it. This explains why the Earth's magnetic field is stable in conflict with prediction that it should decay rather rapidly. Also an explanation for magnetic fields in cosmic scales emerges.
2. The Moon's magnetic field is known to be a surface phenomenon and very probably does originate from the rotation of the Moon's core as the Earth's magnetic field is believed to originate. In TGD, the stable monopole part would induce the flow of charged matter generating Maxwellian magnetic field and magnetization would also take place.

   If the Moon was born in the explosion throwing out the crust of Earth, the recent magnetic field should correspond to the part of the Earth's magnetic field associated with the monopole magnetic flux tubes in the crust. The flux tubes must be closed, which suggests that the loops run along the outer boundaries of the crust somewhat like dipole flux and return back along the inner boundaries of the crust. Therefore they formed a magnetic bubble. I have proposed that the explosions of magnetic bubbles of this kind generated in the explosions of the Sun gave rise to the planets (see this and this).

3. After the explosion throwing out the expanding magnetic bubble, the closed monopole flux tubes could have suffered reconnections changing the topology. I have considered a model for the Sunspot cycle (see this) in terms of a decay and reversal of the magnetic field of Sun based on the mechanism in monopole flux tube loops forming a a magnetic bubble at the surface of the Sun split by reconnection to shorter monopole flux loops for which the reversal occurs easily and is followed by a reconnection back to long loops with opposite direction of the flux. This process is like death followed by decay and reincarnation and corresponds to a pair of "big" state function reductions (BSFRs) in the scale of the Sun. Actually biological death could involve a similar decay of the monopole flux tubes associated with the magnetic body of the organism and meaning reduction of quantum coherence.
4. The formation of the Moon would have started with an explosion in which a magnetic bubble with thickness of about R_E/20 ≈ 100 km, presumably the crust of the Earth, was thrown out. A hole in the bubble was formed and after that the bubble developed to a disk at a surface of possibly expanding sphere, which contracted in the tangential direction to form the Moon. The monopole flux tubes of the shell followed matter in the process. In the first approximation, the Moon would have been a disk. The radius of Moon is less than one third of that for the Earth so that monopole flux tube loops of the crust with length of 2π R_E had to contract by a factor of about 1/3 to give rise to similar flux tubes of Moon. This would have increased the density by a factor of order 9 if the Moon were a disk, which of course does not make sense.

5. If the mass density did not change appreciably, the spherical shell with a hole had to transform to a structure filling the volume of the Moon. One can try to imagine how this happened.
   1. The basic assumption is that the far side corresponds to the surface of the ancient Earth. Near side could correspond to the lower boundary of its crust. A weaker condition is that the near side and a large part of the interior correspond to magma formed in the explosion and in the gravitational collapse to form the Moon. There is indeed evidence that the near side of the Moon has been in a molten magma state. This suggests that the crust divided into a solid part and magma in the explosion, which liberated a lot of energy and heated the lower boundary of the crust.
   2. Part of the solid outer part of the disk gave rise to the far side of the Moon. When the spherical disk collapsed under its own gravitational attraction, some fraction of the solid outer part, which could not contract, formed an outwards directed spherical bulge whereas the magma formed an inwards directed bulge.
   3. The energy liberated in the gravitational collapse melted the remaining fraction of the spherical disk as it fused to the proto Moon. From R_M≈ R_E/3, the area of the far side of the Moon is roughly by a factor 1/18 smaller than the area of the spherical disk, which means that the radius of the part of disk forming the far side is about R_E/4 and somewhat smaller than R_M. Most of the spherical disk had to melt in the gravitational collapse. The thin crust of the near side was formed in the cooling process.
   This model applies also to the formation of planets. The proposal indeed is that the planets formed by a collapse of a spherical disk produced in the explosion of Sun (see this). Moons of other planets could have formed from ring-like structures by the gravitational collapse of a split ring.
6. The magnitude of the dark monopole flux for Earth is about B_M =2B_E/5 ≈ .2 Gauss for the nominal value B_E=.5 Gauss. The monopole flux for the long loops is tangential but if reconnection occurs there are portions with length ΔR  inside  which the flux is vertical and connects the upper and lower boundaries of the  layer. Note  that in the TGD inspired quantum hydrodynamics  also dark Z⁰ magnetic fields associated with hydrodynamic flows  are possible and could be important in superfluidity (see this).
7. As already noticed, the far side of the Moon, which would correspond to the surface of the ancient Earth, is light-colored, which suggests that the monopole magnetic fields might be global and tangential at the far side. If so, the reconnection of the monopole flux tubes have not taken place at the far side. If magnetic anomalies are absent at the far side, the monopole part of the magnetic field should have taken care of the shielding by capturing the ions of the solar wind and cosmic rays as I have proposed. The dark monopole flux tubes play a key role in the TGD based model for the terrestrial life and this raises the question whether life could be possible also in the Moon, perhaps in its interior.

See the article Moon is mysterious or the chapter Magnetic Bubbles in TGD Universe: Part I.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.