The good mode to capture brief space events is to wait at the sky and be patient . Sometimes you get to see thing you are n’t expecting when you are centre on something else . For example , if you were busy looking up at theSuper Wolf Blood Moonlunar eclipse at the weekend you might have also caught a brief flash of a meteoroid hitting our raw satellite .
The event was truly a blink - and - you - drop - it issue but fortuitously so many mass were watching the occultation and so many organisation were pelt it that not only it was caught almost forthwith , we can now apprize it even in gif format . The impact happened at 4:41:38 am GMT exactly , or 11:41:38 pm ET .
A potential impact was first propose by Reddit user Ahecht , and since then both inexpert and professional uranologist have been add up to the evidence that the flash of light was indeed something hit the Moon rather than a local or terrestrial phenomenon . The Redditor control webcasts from Morocco bytimeanddateand footage from theGriffith Observatory live streamand both had the flash in approximately the same location .
“ Could this have been a meteoroid impact on the moon ? ” Ahecht asked in their Reddit post . “ The fact that it was seeable from Morocco and California as well as my location in the Northeast United States would seem to decree out something like a heterosexual person - on meteor in the Earth ’s atmosphere ( although I did see a shooting virtuoso right near the moon a bit before I saw the New York minute ) . ”
The substantiation of the impingement came this morning from theMoon Impacts Detection and Analysis System(MIDAS ) , a project grow by the University of Huelva and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia . MIDAS uses three observatories to capture transient events happening on the control surface of the Moon . We ’ve previously share the project ’s recording oftwo meteors hittingthe Moon .
“ I can confirm that the flash was produced by a meteoroid that come to the lunar ground . The event was recorded by several of our telescopes in the theoretical account of MIDAS , ” Dr Jose Maria Madiedo , from MIDAS , told IFLScience .
Monitoring these impact is very authoritative . By learning about what ishitting the lunar surfacewe can better understand the distance surroundings around the Earth - Moon system . Plus it will be damn utilitarian if we are plan to go back there to continue .
