Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Photo 
  
 Forty-five years after astronauts landed on the moon, scientists say they have finally discovered its true shape: slightly flattened, with a bulge on one side. 
  
 “Like a lemon with an equatorial bulge,” said Ian Garrick-Bethell, a planetary scientist at University of California, Santa Cruz, and an author of the study, being published in the journal Nature. “If you can imagine a water balloon flattening out as you spin it.” 
  
 Efforts to pinpoint the moon’s exact shape have long been stymied by the presence of large craters on its surface that formed after the crust solidified. There have also been inconsistencies between its measurements and what we know about its past. 
  
 For example, the moon barely spins, yet it appears to have the sort of equatorial bulge caused by rotation. And why would a giant ball of cooled liquid be anything but spherical? 
  
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 “There’s no plate tectonics like on the earth,” Dr. Garrick-Bethell said. “Why is it so deformed?” 
  
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 To overcome the crater problem, he and his colleagues used highly accurate maps of the moon’s topography, made with a laser altimeter, then ran calculations to see what the surface could have looked like before the craters formed. 
  
 The measurements that emerged help explain how the moon acquired its shape, the researchers say. Its squashed appearance is probably a result of the gravitational process called tidal heating or acceleration, which stretched the moon’s crust as it was being formed. The equatorial bulge probably dates to a later period, when the moon was still spinning but was slowing down and moving away from earth, freezing a tidal surge in place. ||||| Astrophotographer Anthony Lopez captured this photo of the full moon taken in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico on May 26, 2013. Scientists say they now know how the moon got its lemon shape. 
  
 Earth's powerful gravity tugged the moon into its oddball shape long ago, shortly after both bodies formed, a new study suggests. 
  
 Tidal forces exerted during the early days of the solar system can explain most of the moon's large-scale topography, including its slight lemon shape, reports the study, which was published online today (July 30) in the journal Nature. 
  
 The new findings could help scientists tackle longstanding lunar mysteries, such as why the moon's near side is dominated by dark volcanic deposits, while the far side is not, researchers said. [How the Moon Formed: A Timeline (Gallery)] 
  
 "What is the origin of that asymmetry?" said study lead author Ian Garrick-Bethell, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Chipping away at this problem of the shape of the moon can give us insight into those types of fundamental geology problems," he told Space.com. 
  
 Scientists think the moon formed from debris blasted into space when a mysterious planet-size body slammed into the young Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The moon was born hot, and it came into existence quite close to our home planet. (The moon has been slowly spiraling away ever since.) 
  
 The newborn moon was thus primed to be sculpted by Earth's gravity, and that's exactly what happened, researchers say. 
  
 Indeed, scientists have posited for more than a century that tidal forces helped shape the molten moon, causing bulges that froze into place when Earth's natural satellite cooled down and solidified. But the new study provides a much more detailed understanding of how this likely happened. 
  
 Garrick-Bethell and his team studied topographic data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and information about the moon's gravity field collected by the agency's twin GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft. Though the researchers took a global view of the moon, they focused on areas outside of the body's biggest impact craters, which can complicate such analyses. 
  
 The data strongly implicate tidal effects as a key shaper of the moon, researchers said. For example, tidal forces pulled on the lunar crust, stretching it out and heating it up in places. This process thinned out the crust at the lunar poles and thickened it in the regions that lined up with Earth, helping sculpt the moon into a lemon with two small bulges (one on the side facing our planet, and one on the side directly opposite). 
  
 Such tidal heating could have occurred only when the moon's crust was floating on a sea of molten rock, largely decoupled from the rest of the body, Garrick-Bethell said. 
  
 "This happened a long time ago, when the moon was not completely solid," he said. "This was in the first 100 to 200 million years of lunar thermal evolution." 
  
 Also contributing to the moon's overall shape were more straightforward tidal deformations, which Garrick-Bethell likened to squeezing the lemon with your hands, and rotational forces, which cause spinning bodies such as the moon to flatten at the poles and bulge out near the equator. 
  
 When the moon cooled, the changes wrought by all of these processes were frozen in place. 
  
 Interestingly, the long axis of the moon doesn't point directly toward Earth as it likely did long ago; instead, it's offset by about 30 degrees. This probably happened when volcanic activity, impact cratering and other events made the moon's interior a much less homogeneous place, researchers said. 
  
 "Internal density anomalies have formed, and they've kind of canted the moon," Garrick-Bethell said. "At some point in lunar history, you have these events that took place that caused these density anomalies and shifted the density axis away from the shape axis." 
  
 The new results could have applications beyond the moon, potentially helping researchers better understand any celestial body strongly affected by tidal forces, Garrick-Bethell said. 
  
 "This idea was inspired by Europa," he said, referring to the huge moon of Jupiter. Europa is similar today to Earth's moon long ago, he added, in that it harbors a solid shell (of ice in Europa's case rather than rock) sitting atop an ocean layer (which consists of liquid water rather than magma). 
  
 The study could even yield insights about the evolution of faraway alien planets, Garrick-Bethell said. 
  
 "Tides are so ubiquitous; they're everywhere across the galaxy," he said. "So understanding tidal processes is always important." 
  
 Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com. |||||
Output:
We may have walked on it 45 years ago, but scientists have only now discovered the true shape of Earth's moon. And while it appears to be a perfect sphere, it's actually "like a lemon with an equatorial bulge," one researcher tells the New York Times. "Imagine a water balloon flattening out as you spin it." Using a laser altimeter, the researchers produced topographical maps of the moon's shape in what Gizmodo calls "unprecedented detail." But why the bulge? Scientists theorize that the moon formed almost 5 billion years ago when a large body slammed into Earth and debris got blasted into space. And while they have suggested for decades that tidal forces helped shape the moon, it wasn't until recently that they were able to map out the bulge that froze into place as the moon cooled, reports Space.com. They determined that tidal heating likely stretched the molten moon's crust while it was still forming, and that the bulge formed later as the moon was cooling during a tidal surge that is now essentially frozen in place. (Earth may not be the only planet that helped form the moon.)