On July 16, 1945 humans detonated our first nuclear weapon. Code named Trinity, the detonation released the energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT and was hot enough to turn sand into glass.
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The first nuclear bomb test in history is helping scientists unlock secrets of how the Moon formed
The Trinity nuclear test generated enough heat to melt sand into glass.
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More than 70 years later, researchers led by James Day — at are studying shards of this radioactive glass with hopes of solving a grand scientific mystery: how the Moon formed.
Turns out, the temperatures and pressures at the point of detonation back in 1945 were similar to the conditions that would have occurred during a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object around 4.5 billion years ago, the scientists report.
And the glass generated from the Trinity test have peculiar similarities to Moon samples, which the scientists conclude is another piece of evidence supporting the great impact theory for how the Moon formed.
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