The Earth is slowly warming up as humanity emits greenhouse gases which cause the atmosphere to trap an increasing amount of the sun’s energy.
But astronomers at the University of Utah believe that one strategy to reverse this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet.
For decades, scientists have considered using screens, objects or dust particles to block just enough of the sun’s radiation – between 1 and 2 per cent – to mitigate the effects of global warming.
The authors of the new study argue that launching lunar dust from the moon could be a cheap and effective way to shade the Earth.
They applied a technique used to study planet formation around distant stars, which is typically a messy process that kicks up lots of astronomical dust that can form rings around the host star.
These rings intercept light from the central star and re-radiate it in a way that we can detect on Earth. One way to discover stars that are...