Rain of meteorites makes the moon hum

9 September 2009

THE man in the moon is humming a tune, but thankfully the noise won’t prevent sensors on future moon missions from peeking at the lunar interior.

A steady barrage of small meteorite impacts should cause the moon to “ring”, but no seismometers sent to the moon to date have been sensitive enough to hear it. So Philippe Lognonné at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in France and colleagues decided to work out how loud the ring is.

The team estimated the meteorite population in the solar neighbourhood, and calculated the likely seismic signals that would be created by a …

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