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Scientists have launched a bid to observe and understand mysterious flashes of light on the surface of the moon. The ‘transient luminous lunar phenomena’ occur several times a week and illuminate parts of the moon’s landscape for a brief period of time before disappearing. Sometimes, a reverse effect which causes the lunar surface to darken has also been observed. Although there are several theories about the lunar mystery lights’ origins, they have not yet been fully explained. Now astronomers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany have set up a telescope which will use artificial intelligence to automatically detect the...

Science does not know exactly how these phenomena occur on the moon. But it has attempted to explain them: the impact of a meteor, for example, should cause a brief glow. Such flashes could also occur when electrically charged particles of the solar wind react with moon dust. "Seismic activities...would explain the luminous phenomena, some of which last for hours," says Hakan Kayal, Professor of Space Technology...in Bavaria, Germany. Kayal's team built a lunar telescope and put it into operation in April 2019. It is located in a private observatory in Spain, about 100 kilometres north of Seville in a...

Several telescopes livestreamed the entire eclipse, and multiple people caught a glimpse of a small flash of light, seeming to come from around Lagrange crater. Because this event was seen by multiple observers separated by thousands of miles, the only conclusion is that something hit the moon, and its impact event was recorded on video. ...Further investigation will be necessary to determine the size of the meteoroid and obtain pictures of its impact crater, but for a basis of comparison, the LCROSS mission plowed a Centaur upper stage (2.2 tons) into the lunar surface at 2.5 km/s. This should have...

"As it turns out, the eclipse was even more special than most observers had noticed, as the Moon was actually struck by a meteorite while everyone was gazing in wonder at its rusty appearance. The meteorite itself wasn’t terribly large, and is estimated to have only been around 22 pounds. Still, its impact was large enough to be spotted by observers as well as the automated MIDAS system, and that’s pretty cool." I caught it as well with my own equipment. The impact flash appears at 1:23:04 in my video at about the 8 o'clock position near the edge of...

In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have come from Earth and the rest from the impacting body. The Moon, our planet's constant companion for some 4.5 billion years, may have been forged by a rash of smaller bodies smashing into an embryonic Earth, researchers have revealed. A bombardment birth would explain a major inconsistency in the prevailing hypothesis that the Moon splintered off in a single, giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized celestial body. In such a scenario, scientists expect that about a fifth of the Moon's material would have...

One of the Moon's biggest craters was created by an asteroid more than 250km (150 miles) across, a study suggests. It smashed into the lunar surface about 3.8 billion years ago, forming Mare Imbrium - the feature also known as the right eye of the "Man in the Moon". Scientists say the asteroid was three times bigger than previously estimated and debris from the collision would have rained down on the Earth. The asteroid was so big it could be classified as a protoplanet - a space rock with the potential to become a fully formed world. Lead author Prof...

New NASA-funded research provides evidence that the spin axis of the Moon shifted by about five degrees roughly three billion years ago. The evidence of this motion is recorded in the distribution of ancient lunar ice, evidence of delivery of water to the early solar system. “The same face of the Moon has not always pointed towards Earth,” said Matthew Siegler of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, lead author of a paper in today’s journal Nature. “As the axis moved, so did the face of the “Man in the Moon.” He sort of turned his nose up at...

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites. The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today's rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any...

On April 14th, 1970, a new crater was carved into the surface of the Moon: How do we know it’s new? Because we made it. That’s the impact scar of the third stage of the Saturn V rocket (technically designated S-IVB) that carried Apollo 13 to — but sadly, not on — the Moon. Earlier missions had placed seismic instruments on the lunar surface to measure if the Moon had any activity. They found it did, and in fact several moonquakes were big enough that had you been standing there, you would have felt them quite strongly (and probably been...

The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period is the narrow time interval between 3.8 and 3.9 Gyr ago, where the bulk of the craters we see on the Moon formed. Even more craters formed on the Earth. During a field expedition to the 3.8 Gyr old Isua greenstone belt in Greenland, we sampled three types of metasedimentary rocks, that contain direct traces of the LHB impactors by a seven times enrichment (150 ppt) in iridium compared to present day ocean crust (20 ppt). We show that this enrichment is in agreement with the lunar cratering rate, providing the impactors were comets,...

An enormous impact basin located near the lunar south pole may have caused the Moon to roll over early in its history, new research suggests... Called the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, it is 2500 kilometres wide and 12 kilometres deep and is thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago. Francis Nimmo of the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, believes the impact probably occurred near the Moon's equator. That is because the equator lies in the plane of most other objects in the solar system and therefore would more likely be in a hurtling space rock's...

It’s a disaster scenario that Hollywood has picked up on (think Deep Impact). An incoming object menaces the Earth. Scientists try to destroy it with nuclear weapons, but the horrified populace soon discovers that the blast has simply broken the object into pieces, each with the potential to wreak havoc planet-wide. Now we learn that an impact between two asteroids causing a similar crack-up may have resulted in the cataclysmic event some 65 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute and Charles University (Prague) have been studying the asteroid (298) Baptistina, combining their observations with...

'Lunar Ark' Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth Kevin Holden Platt for National Geographic News August 14, 2007 The moon should be developed as a sanctuary for civilization in case of a cataclysmic cosmic impact, according to an international team of experts. NASA already has blueprints to create a permanent lunar outpost by the 2020s. (Read: "Moon Base Announced by NASA" [December 4, 2006].) But that plan should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, culture, and technology if Earth is hit by a doomsday asteroid or comet, said Jim Burke of International Space University...

The Dark Ages : Were They Darker Than We Imagined? By Greg Bryant Published in the September 1999 issue of Universe As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, a review of ancient history is not what you would normally expect to read in the pages of Universe. Indeed, except for reflecting on the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet (when it should have been as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth - three times closer than Hyakutake in 1996), you may...

Date: Posted 3/4/2002 Cataclysm 3.9 Billion Years Ago Was Caused By Asteroids, Not Comets, Researchers Say WASHINGTON (February 28, 2002) -- The bombardment that resurfaced the Earth 3.9 billion years ago was produced by asteroids, not comets, according to David Kring of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Barbara Cohen, formerly at the UA and now with the University of Hawaii. Their findings appear today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. The significance of this conclusion is that the bombardment was so severe that it destroyed older rocks on ...

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped...

Here are just a few more things to fear that you might not have considered fearing. If you're one of those oblivious people who's not living in constant fear of these things, you need to wake up and put on your pants one leg at a time or expect to pay the pied piper. Killer asteroids. According to Julie Luck, there are 20,000 asteroids just flying like crazy around our solar system ready to slam into Earth at any moment and either completely pulverize the planet or, hopefully, merely wreak massive death and destruction from the skies. A June 2003...

Public release date: 3-Feb-2004 Contact: Dr Derek Ward-Thompson derek.ward-thompson@astro.cf.ac.uk 029-2087-5314 Cardiff University Astronomers unravel a mystery of the Dark Ages Undergraduates' work blames comet for 6th-century "nuclear winter" Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago – a comet colliding with Earth. The team has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter. The scientists in the School of Physics and Astronomy believe this was caused...

(actual link) Corvid meteors observed only in late June of 1937 may be secondaries from the Giordano Bruno impact in June of 1178. Objects that products meteorite falls, fireballs, airwaves, and flashes on the Moon do not show a preference for late June and, therefore, are not part of the Taurid Complex.

May 17, 2013: For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program. "On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've...