Talk:Cold spot (astronomy)

MoS

A couple of notes relating to the Manual of Style.

• Consider adding a short description as recommended by WP:INTHELEAD – ToadalChaos (talk) 22:31, 29 June 2026 (UTC)
  • I added the following short description: Cold regions surrounding impact craters—ToadalChaos (talk) 07:40, 6 July 2026 (UTC)
• The article title is "cold spot", but the lead defines lunar cold spots. This confuses the scope of the article. If the scope includes non-lunar cold spots, the lead and definition should reflect this. See WP:LEAD. In this case, cold spots are de facto mostly only lunar ones, because they have never been observed elsewhere—so we have two options:
  • Extend the lead's language to be more generic, then specify that they have only ever been observed on the Moon and those are therefore the most commonly treated (this is my preferred option as it is more future-proof)
  • Restrict the title to lunar cold spots and mention the possibility of cold spots appearing elsewhere

– ToadalChaos (talk) 22:31, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

@ToadalChaos: Really appreciate your thorough review! I've adressed each comment, here's a quick recap:

Bandfield/SSI attribution — reworded and other planetary scientists at the Space Science Institute to and collaborators in the lead, and adjusted the parallel sentence in §Discovery and early observations the same way. :Checked the 2014 paper's author list: only Bandfield is Space Science Institute (coauthors are at Hawaiʻi, JPL/Caltech ×2, Boise State, Toronto, and UCLA).

Radar backscatter — removed. Read through Bandfield et al. (2014) in full; it never discusses cold spots' radar visibility at all. Replaced with the no-distinguishing-albedo/spectral/morphological-signature claim, which the source does support.

"Same rate" claim — reworked. Williams et al. (2018) doesn't support a uniform rate and on closer read actually argues that large cold spots erase faster on the Moon's leading hemisphere (higher flux of secondary impactors there) and that an individual spot's own degradation slows over time as it fades. Rewrote the Lifespan section around this, and added Costello, Ghent & Lucey (2018) for the finding that primary meteorite/micrometeorite flux alone is too slow to explain the observed fading rate, with secondary cratering the dominant driver instead.

BepiColombo launch date supported w/ a citation to ESA's factsheet.

Broadened the lead's opening sentence ("cold spot" rather than "lunar cold spot," "an airless planetary surface" rather than "the Moon's surface") per your preferred option; the "found only on the Moon" sentence later in the lead already covers the disambiguation.

Huge thanks for helping to overhaul the mathematical notation and adding the short description. Please let me know if anything still needs another pass! RabidTuberculosis (talk) 01:41, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

@RabidTuberculosis thanks for addressing the issues! I corrected a typo and applied the same change to the Bandfield/SSI attribution in a second spot in the article (effectively the same statement).

One last thing: I noticed the <ref name="costello2018" /> is not defined, so we get an error:

Cite error: The named reference costello2018 was invoked but never defined

Once that is fixes, I'd be happy to give this article the GA stamp! —ToadalChaos (talk) 10:25, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

@ToadalChaos: Good catch, fixed! RabidTuberculosis (talk) 16:05, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks!

As this review was started as part of the June 2026 GAN backlog drive, I will wait for an expert reviewer to take a look at this review, as per the policy there. However, I consider this review passed. —ToadalChaos (talk) 08:22, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

@ToadalChaos, I took a look and find this to be a thorough, organized review of the article against the Good Article criteria; consider this an endorsement of your review. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 19:43, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @Reconrabbit! I will close the GAN then. —ToadalChaos (talk) 09:26, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

• Use proper maths rendering for rendering fractional superscripts, eg: ${\displaystyle 40-50{\text{ Jm}}^{-2}{\text{K}}^{-1}{\text{s}}^{-1/2}}$ or 40−50 J m⁻² K⁻¹ s^−1/2 are both a lot more readable than 40–50 J m⁻² K⁻¹ s⁻¹/². See Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Mathematics. I have taken the liberty of fixing this right away in the article.