On Moon Volcanism

Abstract

The Moon craters grew out of Moon volcanism in the remote past. N. A. Kozyrev observed a volcanic eruption at the beginning of November 1958. In the remote past this activity was probably much more intense. The distribution of the craters over the eastern and the western halves of the Moon disk does not support the meteoritic hypothesis of the origin of the Moon craters. We ascertained this in 1955 and 1956 by means of some theorems from the field of continued probabilities bearing on the hemisphere and on the polygon†. The eastern hemisphere of the Moon is continually undergoing a meteoritic bombardment to an even greater degree than the western one, yet no adequate effect is to be observed. It is true that nowadays the orbital velocity of the Moon about the Earth is slow in respect to the annual motion of the Earth about the Sun. However, according to the theory of probability, the slight advantage of the eastern over the western hemisphere would certainly have become apparent after a sufficiently large number (say several hundreds of millions) of years.