Moon Waters May Have Come From Asteroids, New Study Finds

New reports showed that deep inside the moon is a smattering amount of water, and it arrived during its early history with the help of asteroids plunging into its magma.

How and when water arrived in the moon's volcanic lunar locks has been a question for most scientists, but the international team of scientists studying the satellite said that the icy, early asteroids are the most likely source of the water.

According to BBC News, such impacts of the moons crust could have trapped the water in the magma. Much later, volcanic activity brought some of the magma back to the surface, and a precious few volcanic rocks were taken by the Apollo astronauts for study. They found that in these rocks were traces of water, only between 10 and 300 parts per million.

Dr. Jessica Barnes, the main author of the study published in Nature Communications said, "It's not pools of water, it's not lakes of water, it's not frozen ice. When we're talking about interior - or magmatic - water, we're talking about water that is locked up in minerals."

For so long, scientists thought that the Moon was bone-dry, but these new insights showed otherwise. The researchers were able to identify the origins of the water by analyzing the composition of different elements like hydrogen and nitrogen, and comparing them to asteroids and comet.

But why is this important?

James Day, a geoscientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told The Verge that it will help us understand where water on Earth came from. He said, "If you want to understand where water came from on the Earth, it's very helpful to understand where water from your nearest neighbor also originated from. That's going to have collateral effects on understanding the origin of life."

There are still a lot of questions that need answers, but as Barnes put it, we are at a stage where we are starting to understand plenty.