[Program Note: China's announcement that the Moon's far side is 30 degrees colder than the near side has prompted Bob and Fred to postpone till next week discussion of the three remaining news headlines from last week's broadcast.] The laws of physics and the inexorable move toward equilibrium led Michael Seeds, popular textbook author of the 1997 Foundations of Astronomy, to write, "The Moon is now a cold, dead, geologically inactive world." Except that it's not. The following list gives an overview of the various kinds of transient lunar phenomena (TLP). Hundreds of events that last for only a short time, especially as compared to the moon's claimed 4.5 billion year existence. Similarly, a tremendous number of transient events have been documented happening across the solar system (rsr.org/sste). So the questions arise, "Are transient events anomalies?" "How many anomalies must occur before they are no longer anomalies?" And, "Does the tremendous number of observed short-lived events on the moon and throughout the solar system contradict the expectations of the billions of years paradigm?" * RSR's List of Transient Lunar Phenomena: Please excuse our dust :) while we update this list throughout this weekend! - Explosive Outgassing: NASA reports that though, "lunar volcanism was supposed to have ceased billions of years ago... outgassing... a rapid release of gasses, blowing off surface deposits" may have been happening recently "and may still be happening today"! This is not unlike the many magma-less eruptions on Earth that release only volcanic gasses. A 2006 journal Nature paper, Lunar activity from recent gas release, describes a three-square-mile region on the Moon called "Ina" which presents evidence, including Ina's colors, lack of craters, and sharp edges, of "recent, episodic out-gassing from deep within the Moon." (This is in addition to hundreds of other "relatively young craters with crisp outlines and freshly-excavated crustal material [that hasn't] had time to darken from the effects of solar ions and cosmic rays...") - Space Dust Clouds: Major dust clouds are being tenuously gravitationally held in two of the Earth/Moon Lagrange points as reported by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. These "temporary" clouds were mostly ignored for six decades until 2018, overlooked we posit because like dinosaur soft tissue, etc., they don't fit well in the old-earth paradigm. For if the dust is the debris that is assumed to have filled the early solar system, gravitational disturbance from the Sun should have dissipated these clouds billions of years ago. And by the same uniformitarian assumptions, the inner solar system has become relatively dust-free over the last billions of years, and so there wouldn't be enough dust to populate these clouds faster than they would dissipate. Hence, they are temporary. - Fast Lunar Recession: An "anomalously high" lunar recession rate measured in 2007 of the Moon moving away from the Earth by 1.5 inches per year would amount to an unworkable 24,00 miles per billion years, leading to repeated int'l conferences for this "lunar crisis" and then a desperate "dark matter" lunar recession proposal to try to defend the alleged 4.5 billion year age of the moon. - Outgassing of Helium & Oxygen: The AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research reported in 2014 the direct measurement of oxygen and helium in the Moon's exosphere. This built upon the study eight years earlier that led NASA to acknowledge ongoing "outgassing" from one lunar location in particular. - 2014: Cambridge University Press, The New Moon, see Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLP) in chapter 9, The Inconstant Moon - 2013: the most scientifically verifiable observation project (photos taken every 20 seconds) confirming centuries of claims of transient phenomena in particular lunar regions - Dust Accumulation: Dust accumulates on the moon "10 times faster" than previously thought according to a 2013 paper in the journal Sp