Earth's magnetotail could be forming water on the Moon

Solar wind changes the magnetosphere's shape, giving it a long tail on the Earth's night side. This trailing invisible tail attached to Earth is known as a magnetotail., built on previous work showing that Earth's magnetotail rusts iron in the Moon's polar regions.

"This provides a natural laboratory for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water," Li explained in the statement. "When the Moon is outside of the magnetotail, the lunar surface is bombarded with solar wind. Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero.

"To my surprise, the remote sensing observations showed that the water formation in Earth's magnetotail is almost identical to the time when the Moon was outside of the Earth's magnetotail," Li said. "This indicates that, in the magnetotail, there may be additional formation processes or new sources of water not directly associated with the implantation of solar wind protons.

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