A new "Avengers" game was unveiled for the first time on Monday night — it's called "Marvel's Avengers," and it's headed to the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Google Stadia, and PC.

As the name implies, you'll control one of several "Avengers" characters.

Only a handful of those characters are announced as appearing in the game thus far: Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, The Hulk, and Captain America.

The characters aren't based on the movie versions, as you can see below:

"Marvel's Avengers"/Square Enix

What the game actually is remains to be seen — a teaser trailer offers a taste of some drama between the characters following a tragic event.

A description on the YouTube trailer offers a better idea of what to expect: "an epic action-adventure game that combines cinematic storytelling with single-player and co-operative gameplay."

The full description of the game offers a deeper look at what to expect from the game's story:

"'Marvel's Avengers' begins at A-Day, where Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Black Widow, and Thor are unveiling a hi-tech Avengers Headquarters in San Francisco — including the reveal of their own helicarrier powered by an experimental energy source. The celebration turns deadly when a catastrophic accident results in massive devastation. Blamed for the tragedy, the Avengers disband. Five years later, with all Super Heroes outlawed and the world in peril, the only hope is to reassemble Earth's Mightiest Heroes."

Check out the first trailer right here:

Facebook will release new Portal devices in the fall of 2019.

At Recode's Code Conference in Scottsdale Arizona on Monday, Facebook's head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth said that the embattled social networking giant planned to announce new form-factors of the video-chat device later this year, as the company leans into building physical hardware products.

Bosworth, who is known by the nickname "Boz," wouldn't disclose total sales of the Portal, which launched in October 2018 and lets users video-call their contacts and utilise other apps, but described them as "really good." (Tech companies rarely reveal sales numbers of their products — especially relatively new and experimental ones.)

Its launch came as the company lurched from scandal to scandal, facing intense scrutiny on a number of fronts — including on privacy. As such, the creation of a gadget that lives in users' homes and features always-on microphones and cameras struck many commentators as a tone-deaf step from the company. Howecer, the new teasing of new hardware indicates that Facebook is continuing to push forward with the concept.

Boz also said he believed the Portal has had a "really outsized impact" on the broader industry, citing other companies building smart speakers that are also now creating products with screens and cameras built into them.

What will the new Portal devices look like? We don't know. But there have been rumours swirling for months that Facebook is looking at building a TV top-box device that will add video-chat functionality to customers' existing televisions.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Intel is acquiring Barefoot Networks, a Silicon Valley startup that had raised over $150 million from giants like Google, Dell Technologies Capital, Alibaba, and Goldman Sachs.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Intel says that Dr. Craig Barratt, the CEO, and his team will be joining the chip giant after the deal closes, which it expects will happen in the third quarter of 2019.

"Upon close, the addition of Barefoot Networks will support our focus on end-to-end cloud networking and infrastructure leadership, and will allow Intel to continue to deliver on new workloads, experiences and capabilities for our data center customers," Intel data center boss Navin Shenoy said in a blog entry announcing the deal.

Barefoot Networks is a data center networking startup that's taking on the likes of Cisco and Broadcom with an unconventional approach to the market — an approach that focuses on Tofino, its proprietary line of processors that power its lineup of hardware products.

Specifically, Barefoot boasts that Tofino allows developers to program right on the processor itself, the lowest technical level possible, which means that customers can do things with its products that were never originally intended.

For instance, Barefoot says, a Tofino-powered switch can be used to analyze and diagnose network traffic as it travels through the data center, with the developer free to apply fine-tuned controls over exactly what they're looking out for, and add to the model as they go.

This approach stands in contrast to how it usually works: Cisco, Broadcom, and the like usually offer software that lets users install new applications and put their networking gear to use in new and novel ways — but without giving programmers access to the processor itself, which limits what can be done with it.

This philosophy seems to have caught on, however, with Cisco and smaller competitors like Arista Networks both reportedly deciding to use Barefoot's Tofino chips to power some of their newest products.

Also of note is that Barefoot Networks carries something of a pedigree: Nick McKeown, co-founder of Barefoot Networks, was also a founder of Nicira, a networking startup that VMware purchased for $1.26 billion in 2012.

As for Intel, the acquisition of Barefoot Networks makes a certain amount of sense, given that both companies are focused on chips, especially for the data center. However, the deal also comes as Intel faces a rough patch, with revenues in its data center segment recently sliding for the first time in a long time.

While Intel already sells networking products, this is clearly a bet that having Barefoot's technology on its side will open some doors, and perhaps lead it to a stronger market position.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently ended their 6-month, self-imposed quiet period within the company, according to a CNET report on Monday.

Page and Brin attended the company's weekly all-hands meeting (known as "TGIF") on May 30th and spoke about the company's cloud strategy, according to sources who spoke to CNET. A Google spokesperson confirmed with Business Insider that the co-founders were on-stage at the meeting, alongside Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The duo — who regularly attended in the past and often answered questions during these meetings — had reportedly not shown up to a TGIF in 2019, their longest absence in company history.

Page and Brin's "MIA" status came at a time when the company faced an onslaught of internal pressures from employee organizers over its business decisions and practices, including its handling of harassment cases, involvement in military contracts, and building a censored search engine for China.

Questions reportedly arose during the May 30th meeting about alleged cases of retaliation against these employee organizers, though that section was handled by Eileen Naughton, Google's Head of People Operations, not Page or Brin.

Read more: One of the main organizers of the Google Walkout has left the company over fears of 'public flogging, shunning, and stress' if she stayed

Google told Business Insider on Monday that part of the reason why the Alphabet umbrella was created back in 2015 was so that it's co-founders could focus more on the company's "Other Bets," like its self-driving car company Waymo.

TGIF is an all-hands meeting for Google, which oversees Alphabet's core business of search, YouTube, and Android. Pichai is the CEO of Google, while Page is the CEO of Alphabet. The spokesperson would not confirm which projects Brin is currently working on.

Still, the spokesperson said, the co-founders like to "pop in" to TGIF meetings from time-to-time.

Do you work at Google? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at@nickbastone.

Two veterans of the Microsoft antitrust battle that raged 20 years ago have some advice for government regulators seeking to curb the power of today's tech giants.

In conversations with Business Insider, Lawrence Lessig, who briefly served as a special master in the Microsoft case, and Alan Kusinitz, who headed up the legal team representing state governments, stressed the importance of policing anticompetitive behavior even if it falls short of a company break-up, the outcome that never materialized in the Microsoft case.

They also pointed to strategic decisions that, in hindsight, were critical to bolstering the case against Microsoft, as well to some of the miscalculations that would hurt their cause.

The lessons of Microsoft could prove to be invaluable amid a growing debate — from Washington, DC to Silicon Valley — over what to do about Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook, and their dominance of certain markets. At least part of the debate has focused on whether the government should attempt to bring antitrust cases against the companies and maybe even try to split them up.

The Microsoft case was "extremely successful in creating the conditions for the Silicon Valley boom in the beginning of this century," said Lessig, who served first as a special master — the judge's designated fact finder — in the case and later submitted a "friend of the court" brief in it laying out his assessment of the law and facts. "And we ought to learn that lesson."

Regulators are starting to look again at the power of tech giants

To the extent that the Microsoft case is remembered today, it's often portrayed as having been a waste of time. The judge's order to breakup the company into two parts was blocked and then overturned on appeal.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig served as a special master on the Microsoft antitrust case. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images After George Bush replaced Bill Clinton as president, his administration decided to settle the case rather to go back to court to try to reinstate the breakup order. The case ended with what many believed was little more than a wrist slap. And when Microsoft struggled to compete in the new tech markets — search, mobile, social networking, ecommerce — the case seemed to many people to have been all about nothing.

The tech industry's fast pace of innovation and fierce competition mean that it's always several steps ahead of whatever the government is trying to regulate, the argument went. The best way to regulate tech, in other words, was simply to let the market do its thing.

But many inside and outside of Silicon Valley and Washington are re-examining that line of thinking today as the next generation of tech giants has come to hold more and more sway not only over their particular markets, but over the public sphere. The companies have amassed not only massive economic power — they are some of the most valuable and profitable companies on the planet — but also tremendous political power.

Read this: Elizabeth Warren pulled a ninja move to turn tech angst into a crackdown with real teeth, and tech is going to suffer even if she's not president

To a large extent, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter have become the arbiters of free speech. Changes in Facebook's algorithms can make or break media companies that depend on it for distribution, imperiling the health of a free press. The social networks have been hijacked by miscreants to spread misinformation and propaganda, which has influenced elections and in some cases has led to violence and deaths.

Small retailers and goods makers can thrive or die depending on how Amazon treats them and whether it decides to target their markets. Developers and content providers alike can find themselves unable to reach their customers due to to an opaque policy decision by one of the big tech companies.

The market alone won't solve the tech industry's problems

The idea that the market will just solve these problems on its own with no government intervention is deeply mistaken, the veterans of the Microsoft case said. While that view has held sway, the problems have gotten worse, not better.

"What we've seen over the last 20 years is that monopolies have increased," said Alan Kusinitz, a longtime antitrust lawyer who headed up the legal team representing state governments in the Microsoft case. "It's always a mistake to do nothing," he continued.

The laissez-faire view is also mistaken about just how important the Microsoft case was to the tech industry, Kusinitz and Lessig said. It wasn't an accident that competition flourished in the wake of the case, they said.

The case forced Microsoft to change its behavior towards competitors. Prior to the trial, the company was absolutely ruthless, going to lengths to crush any rivals that stood in its way. Microsoft emerged from the case a company that was much less aggressive, partly because of the settlement and partly because it was gun shy after having just been through that battle.

The case "was extraordinarily important in creating an environment where people felt free to innovate without the fear of being destroyed by Microsoft," said Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Amazon and Google's actions resemble Microsoft's

There's something similar going on in the tech industry today to how things were before the Microsoft trial, Lessig and Kusinitz said. The big tech companies dominate their areas in similar ways that Microsoft ruled the PC operating system market.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, which has come under fire for allegedly undermining and undercutting the retailers who sell through its e-commerce marketplace. zz/Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx Google's practice of forcing phone makers to sign contracts that required the manufacturers to install its search and other apps if they wanted to use its version of the Android operating system looks like a page right from Microsoft's playbook, Kusinitz said. Amazon's ruthlessness in dealing with its competitors is similar to Microsoft's as is its alleged practice of abusing its platform.

Amazon has been accused of gleaning sales data from sellers in its marketplace and using that information to undermine those sellers by offering similar products and promoting them on its site in ways its rivals can't.

"Bezos is a bad actor," said Kusinitz. Such practices, he continued, "have to be dealt with in some way."

The immense power of the big tech firms discourages the emergence of any competition. Startups generally avoid the areas in which the firms are dominant. Or entrepreneurs build their companies with the express idea that they'll one day be acquired by one of the tech behemoths.

"The objective of venture capital and innovators is to get big enough to be eaten," said Lessig. "Nobody," he continued, "really believes they can take on Facebook and win."

Research is important, as is defining the problem

But government regulators can draw other lessons from the Microsoft case, Lessig and Kusinitz said, particularly in how the state and federal governments pursued it. One is that enforcement officials should essentially do field research, Lessig said. It's one thing to have economic theories about how markets are supposed to work. It's another to talk with real market participants about how things are working in practice.

That kind of research was how enforcement officials came to understand how Microsoft's dominance in the 1990s was distorting the startup ecosystem and tech industry in Silicon Valley, Lessig said. It also led to some crucial trial testimony, he said.

Prosecutors today, similarly, "ought to be really keen to understand exactly how the system works," he said.

It's also important for regulators to focus any potential enforcement action on clear and supportable antitrust charges and to have a good idea of how those violations could be addressed, Kusinitz said.

The Microsoft case focused on the web browser market and the steps the company took to box out Netscape, the first web browser. The states built a strong case that Microsoft had prohibited PC manufacturers from pre-installing Netscape's Navigator and rival browsers on the machines they sold, he said. Such exclusionary conduct is clearly anticompetitive, a finding that was upheld on appeal, Kusinitz noted.

By contrast, the federal government focused its case on Microsoft's efforts to bundle Internet Explorer browser with Windows. That move wasn't as clearly anticompetitive and the rulings against the company on the counts that related to that conduct were overturned on appeal along with the ruling that Microsoft would be broken up.

The federal government made a mistake in focusing on the bundling issue and not the broader issue of how Microsoft was abusing its dominant platform, Kusinitz said.

"You've got to focus in on the problem," Kusinitz said. The federal government's decision to focus on the browser bundling and not Microsoft's abuse of its platform "was a huge failure," he said.

Got a tip about the tech industry? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Not long after the Apple and Goldman Sachs credit-card collaboration was announced to great fanfare, industry observers — some of which bid on but did not win the deal to work with Apple — came out of the woodwork to voice their concern.

The problem, as they see it: Goldman's profitability outlook for the Apple Card, which charges no fees and boasts consumer friendly features that help customers avoid paying costly interest, is dim.

Omer Ismail, head of consumer digital finance in the Americas for Goldman's Marcus division, isn't sweating it.

When asked about the credit-card's prospects Monday at Business Insider's IGNITION: Transforming Finance event Monday, Ismail threw cold water on the notion that providing value and protection for customers wasn't in their best interest.

"When I think about Marcus overall, the idea that doing right by the customer means being less profitable is just not an idea we subscribe to," Ismail said during a conversation with BI's Dakin Campbell.

Ismail said they take the opposite view: the only way Goldman, a new entrant in the consumer finance world, is going to build a sustainable competitive advantage is by taking care of and winning over customers.

"If you do right by the customer, you're going to ultimately win their loyalty," Ismail said.

Being the new bank on the block gives Goldman advantages, as well. While industry veterans are having to tangle with and spend money revamping ancient systems designed to serve a different era, Goldman is building its consumer business from scratch on the back of modern technology.

"We don't have any legacy business models and we don't have any legacy technology," Ismail said.

In theory, this should mean Goldman can operate a credit-card business more efficiently and at lower costs than some of its competitors.

We'll get more clues about the Apple Card's potential and popularity with customers when it launches later this summer.

Hackers broke into a database of images of travelers and license plates collected by US Customs and Border Protection, the agency said on Monday.

The hackers gained access to the images through a subcontractor's network, CBP said. The subcontractor, which the agency declined to name, had transferred the photographs to its network in violation of CBP policies, the agency said.

"CBP has alerted members of Congress and is working closely with other law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity entities and its own office of professional responsibility to actively investigate the incident," the agency said in a statement.

The agency became aware on May 31 that the subcontractor had transferred the images to its network. CBP did not say when the subcontractor transferred the photographs, when the cyber attack occurred, or how many images were accessed by the hackers.

Read this: Internet pioneer Paul Vixie thinks we're giving up both privacy and speed thanks to the way we've configured our internet connections

Agency spokesman Mike Niezgoda declined to comment on the incident beyond CBP's statement, which he pasted into an email message.

The agency released a separate copy of the statement as a Microsoft Word document that was entitled, "CBP Perceptics Public Statement," according to the Washington Post, which first reported the security breach. The title seemed to indicate that Perceptics, a company that offers license-plate reader technology, was involved in the incident.

Niezgoda declined to confirm whether Perceptics was connected to the breach. Company representatives did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The CBP had been collecting images of travelers at airports and at land border crossings. It has also begun to use facial recognition to identify travelers, including those trying to enter the country illegally.

Got a tip about computer security industry? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Lilium raises $90M Series B for all-electric flying taxi

The next Xbox console will play all your Xbox One games. It will also play all the original Xbox and Xbox 360 games that your Xbox One would play, and it'll work with all your Xbox One accessories.

Indeed, Microsoft confirmed that the new Xbox Elite Controller Series 2 — a $180 premium controller for the most discerning gamer — will be compatible with both the Xbox One and Project Scarlett.

"Your games, your achievements, your progression, your accessories — your console gaming experience with Xbox? It all comes forward with Scarlett," a Microsoft Project Scarlett staffer says in the intro video.

Given that, and given how popular some games are with current-gen console owners — think "Fortnite" and "Minecraft" — a big question is whether those games will work across game console generations.

It sounds like the answer is yes.

"At the highest level, if you talk about these games that have such massive communities today, a lot of those developers and studios are going to want to think about how they grow their community — not take it to zero and rebuild it," Xbox head Phil Spencer told Business Insider in an interview on Sunday evening.

Spencer said he didn't want to speak on behalf of any developers, but that the concept philosophically "fit right in" to the company's vision for the future of Xbox.

The autonomous-driving startup Cruise Automation, which was acquired by General Motors in 2016, is facing technological issues as it seeks to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service by the end of this year, The Information's Amir Efrati reported on Friday. The startup had reportedly once hoped to debut the service in 2018.

Among the issues reportedly experienced by Cruise vehicles are near-accidents, according to The Information; getting stuck in the middle of a trip, taking 80% longer to complete a trip than a human driver would, and erratic braking and steering.

The computers in the vehicles also shut off entirely on occasion, including at one point during a ride taken by the Honda Motor CEO Takahiro Hachigo, according to The Information's report. (Honda is one of Cruise's investors.)

Cruise declined Business Insider's request for comment.

The company's vehicles would come close to getting in a collision about once every 450 miles "several months ago," according to The Information. Cruise had reportedly set a goal of lowering that rate to once every 1,000 miles by the end of 2018.

Read more: Uber and Lyft are betting on self-driving cars to become profitable. But that may not happen, new research from MIT suggests.

And Cruise vehicles reportedly induced discomfort for passengers — by braking abruptly, for example — around 10 times every 10 miles during a recent 30,000-mile stretch of testing, which was similar to a rate of around six to 12 incidents every 10 miles last year, according to The Information.

The vehicles are expected to be only around 5% to 10% as safe as human-driven vehicles by the end of this year, according to internal data cited by The Information.

Cruise is not the only autonomous-driving company that has faced setbacks. The Information reported in August that self-driving vehicles from the Google spinoff Waymo, which launched the first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service in parts of Arizona last year, had difficulty making unprotected left turns, distinguishing between individuals in a large group, and merging into turn lanes and highway traffic, among other trouble areas.

Uber's self-driving program had to halt testing for nine months after one of its vehicles hit and killed a pedestrian in 2018, and Tesla has missed multiple deadlines set by CEO Elon Musk to send a self-driving vehicle across the country.

The research and consulting firm Navigant placed Waymo and Cruise first and second, respectively, in its 2019 ranking of companies developing autonomous-driving technology. The firm evaluated 20 companies based on criteria like strategy and execution.

FedEx may have just rejected millions in potential revenue from Amazon, but it has nothing to worry about.

That's according to Moody's Jonathan Root, the company's senior vice president and lead analyst for FedEx.

"FedEx will achieve higher margins and better returns on its investments in its Express network by redeploying capacity to customers other than Amazon," Root wrote in a note to investors. "While it will take time to fully replace the Amazon volumes with that from other customers, we nonetheless consider the news a credit positive event taking a longer-term perspective."

He postulates FedEx will easily recover the lost business after deciding not to renew its contract with Amazon for FedEx Express shipping.

Read more: FedEx says it will no longer deliver Amazon packages with its fast shipping service

"We believe Amazon, representing less than 1.3% of FedEx's nearly $70 billion of consolidated annual revenue, is one of FedEx's least profitable customers on a margin basis and that the decision implies that Amazon would not agree to financial terms that would meet FedEx's needs," Root wrote in a note to investors on Monday. "We assumed an average revenue per package for Amazon of about $15.00 versus the disclosed composite average of $18.50."

In total, all of FedEx' business with Amazon is worth about $850 million across its different package delivery networks, Root estimates. Amazon's other contracts with FedEx were not affected by the new development.

While FedEx likely just turned down millions in potential revenue from Amazon by deciding not to renew the Express contract, it appears to believe it can make that up by focusing on the other large part of e-commerce that Amazon does not own.

The volume of Amazon packages being affected by the policy change — which Moody's estimates is less than 200,000 packages a day out of a total of 2.9 million packages for FedEx Express US domestic — can be replaced with packages sent by e-commerce shippers who will pay more per package, resulting in increased revenue for the same volume sent through FedEx's logistics network, Root argues.

In its statement about the Amazon contract, FedEx made clear it is looking to service other e-commerce customers apart from Amazon.

FedEx has already made moves to chase this business, including making more of its last-mile FedEx ground deliveries directly instead of handing them over to the US Postal Service. It also announced a new seven-days-a-week delivery schedule that will start in 2020.

"Despite Amazon's large share in driving e-commerce's growth, most of its FedEx US package volume flows through the FedEx Express Network," Root wrote. "This suggests that the impetus for adding year-round Sunday delivery in the FedEx Ground business is driven by a desire to maintain a competitive offering and smooth daily flow through its sorting facilities to improve operating efficiency rather than to serve volume growth from Amazon."

"We respect FedEx's decision and thank them for their role serving Amazon customers over the years," Amazon said in a statement after FedEx announced its decision on Friday.

Although the iPad isn't meant to be a complete replacement for your laptop, Apple's tablet has slowly become a more viable productivity tool in recent years. That's truer than ever with iPadOS, the new software update Apple will be launching for the iPad later this year.

It marks the first time Apple has separated its iPad software from its iPhone operating system, a move that further distinguishes the two products from one another. It's a sensible move — now that smartphones generally have much larger screens today than they did when the original iPad launched in 2010, people are using their phones for some of the tasks they may have turned to a tablet for in the past.

As such, companies like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and others have been positioning their tablets as productivity-oriented devices that offer larger screens than smartphones and better portability than laptops. The iPadOS update will provide new features that are critical in boosting the iPad's performance in this role as a work device.

Apple didn't say precisely when iPadOS will be released, but the company typically debuts new software updates across its products in the fall time frame.

From new copy and paste gestures to improved multitasking, here are our favorite new features coming to the iPad later this year.

The far side of the moon is hiding a colossal secret beneath its airless, pockmarked surface.

No one is quite sure what it is — the most precise wording researchers can muster is a "large excess of mass."

The feature lurks dozens of miles beneath a 1,550-mile-wide impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which we can't see from Earth. Ideas for what the mysterious lump may be include the splattered core of a giant metallic asteroid or an ocean of red-hot magma that slowly froze in place.

"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground," Peter B. James, a geoscientist at Baylor University, said in a press release. "That's roughly how much unexpected mass we detected."

James is one of a handful of US scientists who announced their discovery in a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The gravitational force of "whatever it is, wherever it came from," James said, is so great that it drags down the floor of the basin by more than half a mile.

A rendering of a lunar rover for China's Chang'e-4 moon mission. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)

The South Pole-Aitken Basin is believed to be the site of a horrendous collision that occurred about 500 million years after the moon formed. It's thought to be the largest and oldest intact crater on any planetary body within the solar system.

Whatever formed the basin nearly 4 billion years ago remains a mystery, but the blow was so strong that it likely punched all the way through the moon's crust and tossed part of the lunar mantle — a deeper geologic layer — onto the surface.

For these reasons, geologists are eager to explore the basin to glean clues about the moon's formation and composition. In fact, China recently landed its Chang'e 4 mission there (specifically within a roughly 111-mile-wide crater called Von Kármán) to study part of the basin.

James and his colleagues discovered the anomaly beneath the basin by merging data from two NASA missions at the moon. One is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which continues to constantly photograph the lunar surface and has led to high-definition surface elevation maps.

Read more: NASA photographed the crash site of Israel's failed moon lander, and it's not pretty

The other mission was the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), which involved two spacecraft — GRAIL A and GRAIL B — working in tandem to detect variations in the strength of the moon's gravitational field. Larger variations helped tease out information about the moon's core, and subtler ones revealed unseen mineral deposits, asteroid impact sites, and subsurface features.

"When we combined that with lunar topography data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we discovered the unexpectedly large amount of mass hundreds of miles underneath the South Pole-Aitken basin," James said. "One of the explanations of this extra mass is that the metal from the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the moon's mantle."

If the mass is a metallic asteroid core, it didn't get stuck inside the moon intact; instead, computer simulations suggest it could have spread out as it struck. The researchers think such splattering may have kept the metal floating about 186 miles beneath the crust; otherwise it might have sunk down into the moon's core, which starts about 310 miles deep.

Another explanation is that, following the impact that formed the basin, a huge ocean of metal-rich magma pooled inside of the lunar crust and solidified into a dense slab.

Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital