The man in the moon got a serious poke in the eye when a meteorite the size of a small car slammed into the lunar surface to make a fresh new crater. And astronomers in Spain managed to get a video of the collision.
The meteorite punched a hole in Mare Nubium or Sea of Clouds, an ancient lava-filled basin that produces one of the black patches in the lunar surface we can see from earth. Nothing new some might say given the amount of craters that pock mark the surface of the moon.
This impact was different however because it is extremely rare to capture images of an impact of this kind.
Space isn't always empty and there are still plenty of rocks of all sizes out there, from no bigger than a grain of sand to the two kilometre across behemoths. Our atmosphere is enough to break up the smaller ones that head in our direction, but the moon doesn't have the protection of an atmosphere. This makes it a sitting duck if a big rock comes to call.
The moon has been pummelled in this way since its formation about 4.5 billion years ago, the latest hit on September 11th last year. Spanish astronomer Prof Jose M Madiedo of the University of Huelva and Dr Jose L Ortiz from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia are involved in Midas, the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System. This is a network of automated telescopes all trained on the moon in the hopes of detecting an impact and this is what happened last September. The scientists describe the event in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
If you had been lucky enough to be looking at the moon that night and at the right time, 8.07pm, you would have seen a bright flash and then an afterglow that lasted for about eight seconds. This makes it the longest and brightest confirmed impact flash ever observed on the moon. “At that moment I realised that I had seen a very rare and extraordinary event,” Prof Madiedo writes.
The researchers calculate that the impactor had a mass of about 400kg and was about a metre wide. It struck the Mare Nubium at a galloping 61,000km per hour, in the process knocking out a new crater about 40 metres across in an explosion equivalent to 15 tonnes of TNT.
