We now have a "treasure map" to find dust from ancient supernova explosions buried on the Moon.
By modeling how moon dust is mixed by impacts, scientists predicted the exact depths where radioactive isotopes from dead stars are hidden. This gives the Artemis missions a specific target to dig for a literal physical history of the Milky Way's explosions.
Gardening on the Moon: An Advection-Diffusion Model to Guide the Search for Supernova Debris in the Lunar Regolith
arXiv · 2604.09524
The vertical redistribution of materials in the lunar regolith - ranging from continuously produced space-weathering products to sporadic pulses of supernova- or kilonova-derived isotopes - remains a fundamental problem in planetary science. We present a unified stochastic model of regolith gardening induced by the impact flux. Treating gardening as a competition between impact-driven advection and diffusion predicts the maturity profiles of Apollo cores over more than two orders of magnitude in