Testing the axial dipole hypothesis for the Moon by modeling the direction of crustal magnetization

Description

Orbital magnetic field data show that portions of the Moon's crust are strongly magnetized, and paleomagnetic data of lunar samples suggest that Earth strength magnetic fields could have existed during the first several hundred million years of lunar history. The origin of the fields that magnetized the crust are not understood and could be the result of either a long-lived core-generated dynamo or transient fields associated with large impact events. Core dynamo models usually predict that the field would be predominantly dipolar, with the dipole axis aligned with the rotation axis. We test this hypothesis by modeling the direction of crustal magnetization using a global magnetic field model of the Moon derived from Lunar Prospector and Kaguya magnetometer data. We make use of a model that assumes that the crust is unidirectionally magnetized. The intensity of magnetization can vary with the crust, and the best fitting direction of magnetization is obtained from a nonnegative least squares inversion. From the best fitting magnetization direction we obtain the corresponding north magnetic pole predicted by an internal dipolar field. Some of the obtained paleopoles are associated with the current geographic poles, while other well-constrained anomalies have paleopoles at equatorial latitudes, preferentially at 90 ∘ east and west longitudes. One plausible hypothesis for this distribution of paleopoles is that the Moon possessed a long-lived dipolar field but that the dipole was not aligned with the rotation axis as a result of large-scale heat flow heterogeneities at the core-mantle boundary.

Abstract

International audience

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