The meteorite impact caused a bright flash, indicated by the arrow Jose M. Madiedo Observers of Monday’s lunar eclipse were blessed with the first known sighting of a meteorite impact during such an event. The so-called “super wolf blood moon” was eagerly watched by millions of people around the world, mostly via live streaming video. During the eclipse, some people noticed a tiny flash, a brief yellow-white speck, popping up on the lunar surface during the online broadcasts. Advertisement One Reddit user raised the possibility that this was a meteorite impact and others scoured eclipse footage for evidence of the event. A flash is visible in at least three different videos. Jose Maria Madiedo at the University of Huelva in Spain has confirmed that the impact is genuine. For years, he and his colleagues have been hoping to observe a meteorite impact on the moon during a lunar eclipse, but the brightness of these events can make that very difficult – lunar meteorite impacts have been filmed before, but not during an eclipse. On this occasion, Madiedo doubled the number of telescopes trained on different parts of the moon – from four to eight – in the hope of seeing an impact. “I had a feeling, this time will be the time it will happen,” says Madiedo. After the eclipse, software automatically pinpointed a flash in imagery recorded by several of his telescopes. This helps to confirm that the flashes seen by live stream-watchers were not just optical anomalies on camera sensors. “I was really, really happy when this happened,” says Madiedo. He notes that the flash was quite bright and it struck the moon at a moment when the eclipse was not overly luminous itself, perhaps making the strike easier to detect. Although he has not yet formally calculated an estimate for the size of the space rock that collided with the moon, Madiedo thinks it probably had a mass of about 2 kilograms and was roughly the size of a football. Experience Argentina’s 2020 total solar eclipse: Witness a rare celestial event on a New Scientist Discovery Tour “The combination of a darkened surface and a lot of people watching made it much more likely that the flash of impact was seen – and it reminds us that the solar system is still a very dynamic place,” says Robert Massey at the Royal Astronomical Society. When this article was first published it included a video of a collision recorded in December 2018. It has been replaced with the correct video showing the January meteorite impact during the lunar eclipse. We corrected the measure of the mass of the meteorite<doc-sep>This weekend's stunning lunar eclipse seems to have come with a little extra flash, thanks to a brilliant coincidence — a burst of light at about the time totality began, marking the end of a meteorite's journey to the moon. The meteor strike takes place in the region darkened by Earth's shadow, as you can see in videos of the eclipse. There's no reason to worry. The moon regularly suffers impacts; the collisions are how the lunar surface acquires an average of 140 new craters a year — and that tally only includes those more than 32.8 feet (10 meters) across. [Amazing Photos of the Super Blood Wolf Moon!] The flash of a meteor impact is visible at lower left in this gorgeous shot of the "Super Blood Wolf Moon" total lunar eclipse of Jan. 20-21, 2019, captured by Brett Ashton. (Image credit: Brett Ashton) A zoomed-in view of the impact on the moon, photographed by Brett Ashton during the total lunar eclipse of Jan. 20-21, 2019. (Image credit: Brett Ashton) Scientists are sometimes lucky enough to have instruments in the right place at the right time to catch the flash of light accompanying the high-speed impact. (A Spanish telescope caught sight of two such impacts in quick succession in July 2018.) But this impact came as people around the world looked to the sky — and livestreamed telescope broadcasts — to watch the total lunar eclipse, the last until 2021. Meteorite impacts aren't just flashy, there's also real scientific knowledge to be learned from them. NASA has a team dedicated to monitoring these flashes because they can teach us about the debris cluttering our solar system. There's value to looking back in time as well. The moon's surface offers a detailed historical record of impacts, since there aren't nearly as many forces there as on Earth that wipe away craters — no rain, no plate tectonics. And unlike Earth, the moon doesn't carry a thick protective atmosphere that burns up smaller pieces of debris. That means the lunar surface can act as a stand-in for scientists who want to understand how many impacts have hit Earth over the eons. The eclipse impact will be one more crater for scientists to pore over. Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.<doc-sep>A meteorite struck the Moon during Monday’s lunar eclipse, causing a brief, bright flash on the surface. Image : Jose M. Madiedo/MIDAS If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Such is the philosophy of Jose Maria Madiedo, an astronomer at the University of Huelva in Spain, who, for over 10 years, has tried to capture a meteorite hitting the Moon during a lunar eclipse. Yesterday, during the so-called “Super Blood Wolf Blood Moon,” it finally happened. Advertisement Monday’s much anticipated Super Blood Wolf Moon eclipse, though badly named, did not disappoint. Millions of people gazed into the night sky or onto video feeds to see a stunning coppery-red hue envelop our planet’s natural satellite. As the January 21 eclipse unfolded, however, some observers noticed a tiny flash while watching the online broadcasts, reported New Scientist. Some suspected the flash was caused by a meteorite strike—and it turns out they were right. A close-up of the impact flash. Image : Jose M. Madiedo/MIDAS Jose Madiedo confirmed these suspicions, tweeting that a lunar impact occurred at 5:41am Spanish Peninsular Time. A photograph released by Madiedo clearly showed a yellowish-white dot appearing in the darkened top left quadrant of the Moon during the totality phase of the eclipse. Astronomers have filmed impact flashes on the Moon before, but this marks the first time a lunar impact was captured during a lunar eclipse—an achievement more than 20 years in the making. Astronomers first started to systematically monitor impact flashes in 1997, an effort that evolved into the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System, or MIDAS, a survey conducted by the University of Huelva and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia. Madiedo joined the project in 2008. Using astronomical data from multiple observatories, MIDAS uses software to identify the moment a meteorite hits the darkened portions of the lunar surface. “We monitor the nocturnal region of the Moon to identify impact flashes. In this way, these flashes are well contrasted against the darker background,” Madiedo explained to Gizmodo. “So, we usually monitor the Moon about five days after the New Moon, and around five days before the New Moon. We also monitor during lunar eclipses, since during these eclipses the lunar ground is dark.” The telescopes used by MIDAS are equipped with high-sensitivity video cameras and record video continuously during the observing session. These videos are then analyzed by software, which automatically identifies lunar impact flashes and calculates their position on the Moon. Madiedo said the system can detect the moment of an impact flash to an accuracy of about 0.001 seconds. Since 2015, the team has applied photometric filters to some of their telescopes, allowing them to determine the temperature of these flashes. As noted, MIDAS had (prior to yesterday) never captured a meteorite strike during a total lunar eclipse—but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Madiedo said he doesn’t know the exact number of eclipses MIDAS has monitored to date, but, weather permitting, he said every lunar eclipse has been monitored since the survey started. Other groups have also tried to detect lunar flashes during an eclipse, said Madiedo, but none succeeded—until now. Advertisement “When the automatic detection software notified me of a bright flash, I jumped out of my chair.” Normally, Madiedo’s team uses four telescopes to monitor the Moon, but this time they decided to use eight. Considerable work was required to both set up and test the new instruments. Advertisement “In total I spent almost two days without sleeping, including the monitoring time during the eclipse,” Madiedo told Gizmodo. “But I made the extra effort to prepare the new telescopes because I had the feeling that this time would be ‘the time,’ and I did not want to miss an impact flash. One instrument had a technical issue and failed. I was exhausted when the eclipse ended—but when the automatic detection software notified me of a bright flash, I jumped out of my chair. It was a very exciting moment because I knew such a thing had never been recorded before.” Madiedo said the odds of an impact flash of this magnitude is around once every seven to 10 days. His team hasn’t analyzed all the data yet, but a preliminary guess is that the object, likely a tiny asteroid, had a mass around 22 pounds (10 kilograms). Advertisement By studying these flashes, scientists can acquire better statistics about the rate of lunar impacts, and by consequence the rate at which the Earth’s atmosphere is pelted by similarly sized objects. Advertisement On a related note, a recent study suggested the rate of big asteroid impacts on Earth increased around 290 million years ago. This conclusion was reached by studying the history of impact craters on the lunar surface. Our Moon may look nothing like Earth, but when it comes to celestial impacts, we have a shared history. [New Scientist]<doc-sep>
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Wait, it’s a meteorite hitting the moon? On Sunday, millions of people around the world watched as the Earth’s shadow covered the moon in a copper-reddish glow in what was known as a “super blood wolf moon.” It was the first full moon of the year (a wolf moon) and it came at a time when the moon was also closest to Earth (a super moon) and going through a lunar eclipse (a blood moon). While observing the eclipse, however, some observers noticed a small flash on the moon. Many astronomers speculated what had happened, but one of them, Jose Maria Madiedo from the University of Huelva in Spain, quickly confirmed that it was indeed a meteorite that hit the moon. “A rock hits the moon during the total eclipse,” Madiedo tweeted on the morning of Jan. 22. Attached to his tweet was a YouTube link displaying the impact on the top-left half of the moon. Madiedo observed the meteorite flash through Spain's Moons Impacts Detection and Analysis System (MIDAS), which is run by the University of Huelva and the Institution of Astrophysics of Andalucia. The MIDAS project uses data from several astronomical observatories throughout the country to track flashes on the moon's surface and gather information about the rate of lunar impacts, which in turn can tell astronomers about the frequency of impacts in the Earth's atmosphere. “We employ an array of telescopes endowed with high-sensitivity cameras that monitor the lunar surface in order to detect these events,” Madiedo told ABC News. Meteorite impacts happen all the time, Madiedo said, but they aren't easy to record for MIDAS, which requires the moon to be dark so that the white flash is visible — usually during the 10 days around a new moon. He said that this lunar impact was significant because it was the first time astrophysicists in this field of research were able to record a lunar impact during a lunar eclipse. The next lunar eclipse will only be a partial lunar eclipse, visible from South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. It will occur on July 16. As for another meteorite strike, those can occur at any time, but they’ll most likely require astronomers to release videos and pictures.