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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sarah Casewell answered on 20 Jun 2014:
The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere as it’s not really big enough to hold onto one. This means it doesn’t have oxygen or nitrogen etc like we do on earth.
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Natasha Stephen answered on 20 Jun 2014:
The Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere so there isn’t any oxygen. It used to be a part of the Earth that got blasted off 3 billion years ago when something big hit Earth, but it didn’t take any of our atmosphere with it.
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Sam Connolly answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Moons and planets can only have atmospheres if their gravity is strong enough to hold the gas down. Gases are made of lots of individual particles which are zooming around in different directions, which have a lot of energy. If they have enough energy to go fast enough to get off the moon or planet, then none of the gas will stay, so there won’t be an atmosphere. The Moon is too small, so it has no atmosphere and therefore no oxygen!
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Roberto Trotta answered on 26 Jun 2014:
Strange as it might seem, oxygen is actually a toxic gas! It is found in Earth’s atmosphere because it accumulated there over million of years, being produced by plants as they “breathe out”.
The reason why oxygen is toxic is because it is a very reactant chemical — it binds easily with other elements (think of the phenomenon of burning: it requires oxygen!). For example, rusting of iron is a consequence of oxygen being very aggressive and binding itself to iron, making it go rusty.
So it took hundreds and hundreds of million of years for new lifeforms to emerge on earth that actually could use oxygen to survive — all the animals do it today.
Back to your question: There is no oxygen on the moon because there have never been any plants to produce it. And there have been no plants because there is no atmosphere to begin with, as the gravity of the Moon is too weak to hold on to an atmosphere — if there was any, it would have evaporated into space.
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