The Moon and albedo

I learnt a new word recently: albedo. It means the fraction of incident light that is reflected from a surface. The Moon is a pale colour and quite bright so I expected that it would reflect a lot of light. It turns out that the albedo is 0.12 which means that it reflects back 12% of the light from the Sun that hits it. The suggestion is that the rest of the energy goes to heat the Moon. http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut26-1.htm