What is Moon Made Of?

Moon, Jupiter

Lunar center is thick and made of metals. The core main compounds are iron and nickel. Internal core is firm bulk with diameter approximately 480 km. There is an external fluid core as well that frames the internal one. As the result, the total diameter of the core is approximately 660 km. The core of the Moon is not that big, it makes only up to 1/5 of the total diameter. Though when it comes to other celestial bodies like Earth the core makes around 50% of the total diameter.

The core is covered with the mantle and crust. The compounds of these two can tell us more about the origin of the Moo. It shows that the Moon is mostly made of magma at the very beginning. During magma’s cooling off process, some crystals appeared in its structure. Depending on the type of the chemical, the crystals were distributed like ones with higher thickness pyroxene and olivine went down in the ocean. Less thick elements like anorthositic rocks crystalized and formed the Moon surface or crust. The density of the crust is around 50 km, while the density of the mantle is more than 1300 km.

The density of the crust on the side towards the Earth is actually thinner, than the one on the other side. It is still to be identified why it happened this way.

Apollo missions were one of the most informative one when it comes to the Moon, and after one of the missions, it was revealed that the Moon also has quakes. Deep moonquakes, that happen widely approximately 700 km under the Moon crust are the consequences of the Earth pull and are called the tidal events.

The quakes that are rather superficial are mainly caused by external objects like meteoroids. Also, the shallow moonquake might be cause by rapid thermal difference between lunar day and night, making the rocks to compress.

The last type of the moonquake at around 20 km depth, they are classified at 5.5 on Richter’s scale and its origin is still unknown. Usually, the duration of the quake is more than 10 minutes.

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