A new study has found that Moon inherited the indigenous noble gases of helium and neon from Earth's mantle.

Researchers from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, discovered the first definitive proof that the Moon inherited indigenous noble gases from the Earth's mantle, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

"Finding solar gases, for the first time, in basaltic materials from the Moon that are unrelated to any exposure on the lunar surface was such an exciting result," said Cosmochemist Patrizia Will, study lead researcher at the Washington University, St. Louis.

The Moon has long been a source of fascination for humans. However, it was not until Galileo's time that scientists began to investigate it seriously.

Over the course of nearly five centuries, scientists proposed numerous, heavily debated theories about how the Moon formed.

Now, a team of geochemists, cosmochemists, and petrologists has shed new light on the Moon's origin story.

The discovery is an essential piece of the puzzle in understanding how the Moon, possibly the Earth and other celestial bodies, formed.

It adds to the already strong constraints on the famous "Giant Impact" theory, which proposes that the Moon was formed by a massive collision between Earth and another celestial body.

Patrizia Will examined six samples of lunar meteorites from an Antarctic collection obtained from NASA as part of her doctoral research at ETH Zurich.

The meteorites were made of basalt rock, formed when magma rose from the Moon's interior and quickly cooled. After their formation, they were covered by additional basalt layers, shielding the stone from cosmic rays, particularly solar wind.

The cooling process resulted in the formation of lunar glass particles amongst the other minerals found in magma, read the research.

Will and his colleagues discovered that the glass particles retain the chemical fingerprints (isotopic signatures) of the lunar gases helium and neon.

Asteroids continue to pelt the Moon's surface in the absence of an atmosphere. The meteorites were most likely ejected from the middle layers of the lava flow by a high-energy impact, similar to the vast plains known as the Lunar Mare.

The rock fragments eventually made their way to Earth in the form of meteorites. Many of these meteorite samples are found in North African deserts or, in this case, Antarctica's "cold desert," where they are easier to spot in the landscape, the research documented.

The Noble Gas Laboratory at ETH Zurich houses a state-of-the-art noble gas mass spectrometer known as "Tom Dooley."

The research team was able to measure sub-millimeter glass particles from meteorites using the Tom Dooley instrument, ruling out the solar wind as the source of the detected gases. The helium and neon they discovered were much more abundant than expected.

The Tom Dooley is so sensitive that it is the only instrument in the world capable of detecting such low helium and neon concentrations. It was used to detect these noble gases in the grains of the Murchison meteorite, which is 7 billion years old and the oldest known solid matter.

A significant advancement is being able to locate specific meteorites among NASA's enormous collection of roughly 70,000 approved meteorites.

"I am strongly convinced that there will be a race to study heavy noble gases and isotopes in meteoritic materials," said Professor Henner Busemann of ETH Zurich, one of the world's leading scientists in the field of extra-terrestrial noble gas geochemistry.

He predicts that researchers will soon be looking for noble gases such as xenon and krypton, which are more challenging to identify. They will also look for other volatile elements in the lunar meteorites, such as hydrogen or halogens.

"While such gases are not necessary for life, it would be interesting to know how some of these noble gases survived the brutal and violent formation of the moon," said Buseman.

"Such knowledge might help scientists in geochemistry and geophysics to create new models that show more generally how such most volatile elements can survive planet formation, in our solar system and beyond."

The origin of volatiles in the Moon’s interior is debated. Scenarios range from inheritance through a Moon-forming disk or “synestia” to late accretion by meteorites or comets. Noble gases are excellent tracers of volatile origins. We report analyses of all noble gases in paired, unbrecciated lunar mare basalts and show that magmatic glasses therein contain indigenous noble gases including solar-type He and Ne. Assimilation of solar wind (SW)–bearing regolith by the basaltic melt or SW implantation into the basalts is excluded on the basis of the petrological context of the samples, as well as the lack of SW and “excess 40Ar” in the magmatic minerals. The absence of chondritic primordial He and Ne signatures excludes exogenous contamination. We thus conclude that the Moon inherited indigenous noble gases from Earth’s mantle by the Moon-forming impact and propose storage in the incompatible element-enriched (“KREEP”) reservoir.