Rock from 4,200,000,000 years ago confirms something we wondered about the moon

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A cosily long time ago, new research confirms.

China's Chang'e-6 spacecraft, the first to bring back a load of rocks and soil from the largely unexplored far side.

A potential breakthrough was discovered by two separate teams in Australia, uncovering fragments of volcanic rock estimated to be around 2.8 billion years old. A particularly notable find was a piece of rock dating back an astonishing 4.2 billion years.

‘Get a sample from this area, it's a biggie because we don't know much about it otherwise,' said Christopher Hamilton, a bloke who studies volcanoes on planets at the University of Arizona.

Researchers reckon there were volcanoes erupting on the moon's near side, which is the bit of the moon we can see from Earth, about the same time as elsewhere.

Past research, including data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, suggested that the far side may have had a volcanic past as well.

The first samples from that area on the opposite side of the planet to Earth show a history of volcanic activity. The findings were released in the magazines Nature and Science last Friday.

China has launched a few spacecraft to the moon. (no change as no paraphrasing is necessary)

In 2020, the Chang'e-5 spacecraft brought back moon rocks from the near side, the first since those collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts and the Soviet Union's spacecraft in the 1970s.

In 2019, the Chang'e-4 spacecraft made history by becoming the first to explore the far side of the moon.

G'day, the moon's far side's got heaps of craters and not as many flat, dark plains as the near side, which were formed by volcanic lava flows.

Why the two halves are so different is still unexplained, said study co-author Qiu-Li Li from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Li said the new discoveries show there've been more than one billion years of volcanic eruptions on the moon's far side.

Ongoing investigations will work out how the activity went for such a long time.

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