'Biggest observed meteorite impact' hits Moon

Scientists say they have observed a record-breaking impact on the Moon.

Spanish astronomers spotted a meteorite with a mass of about half a tonne crashing into the lunar surface last September.

They say the collision would have generated a flash of light so bright that it would have been visible from Earth.

The event is reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"This is the largest, brightest impact we have ever observed on the Moon," said Prof Jose Madiedo, of the University of Huelva in south-western Spain.

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The impact we detected lasted over eight second.





Prof Jose Madiedo
University of Huelva
The explosive strike was spotted by the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System (Midas) of telescopes in southern Spain on 11 September at 20:07 GMT.

"Usually lunar impacts have a very short duration - just a fraction of a second. But the impact we detected lasted over eight seconds. It was almost as bright as the Pole Star, which makes it the brightest impact event that we have recorded from Earth," said Prof Madiedo.

The researchers say a lump of rock weighing about 400kg (900lb) and travelling at 61,000km/h (38,000mph) slammed into the surface of the Moon.

They believe the dense mass, which had a width of 0.6-1.4m (2-4.6ft), hit with energy equivalent to about 15 tonnes of TNT.

This is about three times more explosive than another lunar impact spotted by Nasa last March. That space rock weighed about 40kg and was about 0.3-0.4m wide.

Scarred Moon

The team believes the impact has left behind a 40m-wide crater.

"That's the estimation we have made according to current impact models. We expect that soon Nasa could observe the crater and confirm our prediction," said Prof Madiedo.

It would be one of many scars on the lunar surface.

Unlike Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere to shield it from meteorite collisions, and its surface shows a record of every strike.

The researchers believe that impacts from rocks of about 1m in diameter could be far more common than was previously thought - both on the Moon and on Earth.

However, most rocks of this size would burn up as they entered the Earth's atmosphere, appearing as a fireball in the sky.

For meteorites to make more of an impact here, they need to be larger.

For example, the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia on 15 February 2013 was estimated to be about 19m wide.

It hit the atmosphere with energy estimated to be equivalent to 500,000 tonnes of TNT, sending a shockwave twice around the globe. It caused widespread damage and injured more than 1,000 people

BBC

So I'm wondering why this news only surfaced today (I don't know if it did), but it's the first I heard of it.
This impact must of been quite awesome to see, and no doubt will start a few conspiracy's regarding the "moon is occupied" crowd

With Earth having an explosion of increased space rocks (caught on camera), I imagine so will the moon.

Another scar for our shining rock warrior.

Interesting. Thanks.

Perhaps we will be hearing more of these larger impacts given the area of solar system and galaxy we are entering.

www.universetoday.com...

There are just so many ways the Universe is out to get us. Astronomers have already considered the threat from our Sun’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way. When our Sun rises up out of flat plane of the Milky Way, it appears we might be less protected from intergalactic radiation and cosmic rays.

Well, it looks like passing through the middle of the galactic plane might have its own share of risks: an increased number of comets might be hurled towards the Earth because of gravitational interaction with the densest parts of our galaxy.

Researchers at the Cardiff Centre of Astrobiology have built a computer model of the Solar System’s journey around the Milky Way. Instead of making a perfectly flat orbit around the galaxy’s centre, it actually bounces up and down. At times it can rise right up out of the galactic plane – getting 100 light years above – and then dip down below it. They calculated that we pass through the plane every 35 to 40 million years.

And this time period seems to match dangerous periods of impacts on Earth. According to the number and age of craters on Earth, we seem to suffer increased impacts every 36 million years. Uh oh, that’s a match.
In fact, one of these high points of comet activity would have been 65 million years – the same time that an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs.


And here’s the bad news. According to their calculations, the Solar System will be passing through the galactic plane in the near future, and should see an increased risk of impact. Our risk of impact could increase 10-fold.
There might be a silver lining to the bounce, though. The impacts might have helped life spread across the galaxy.

While the “bounce” effect may have been bad news for dinosaurs, it may also have helped life to spread. The scientists suggest the impact may have thrown debris containing micro-organisms out into space and across the universe.
Centre director Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said: “This is a seminal paper which places the comet-life interaction on a firm basis, and shows a mechanism by which life can be dispersed on a galactic scale.”

reply to post by theabsolutetruth



Exciting and scary times ahead, the Earth has survived so much, so has the moon, bring it on i say

Humanity needs a change of thinking.

maybe the last race of humanoids got off earth before the last impact, and then when earth physically healed, they came back to a planet where the only species of animal that was as close a match to them was the ape. they inserted their own humanoid strands into the DNA of these primitive apes, and the evolution of man began. they have come back from time to time, and were considered god(s)....

I like the silver lining bit...

Some of my intestines could be spread throughout the galaxy...to bring about new life...

Comforting...

reply to post by MarioOnTheFly


Sometimes you gotta give to receive, erm maybe!

reply to post by theabsolutetruth

And here’s the bad news. According to their calculations, the Solar System will be passing through the galactic plane in the near future, and should see an increased risk of impact.

Sure, if you consider 28 million years to be the "near future".

In addition, the solar system moves perpendicular to the galactic plane in a harmonic fashion, with a period of 52 to 74 million years and an amplitude of ~49 to 93 pc out of the galactic plane. (The uncertainties in the estimates of the period and amplitude of the motion are caused by the uncertainty in the amount of dark matter in the galactic disk.) The Sun and planets passed through the galactic plane about 2-3 million years ago, moving "northward."

www.astro.ncu.edu.tw...

Would be cool to see a pic of the new crater, to compare with others around.

S&F

jimmyx
maybe the last race of humanoids got off earth before the last impact, and then when earth physically healed, they came back to a planet where the only species of animal that was as close a match to them was the ape. they inserted their own humanoid strands into the DNA of these primitive apes, and the evolution of man began. they have come back from time to time, and were considered god(s)....

I second that!

Wait a minute, major deja vu for me, since this was around my birthday. I could have sworn there was media attention (and ATS attention) for this back then. Or was there another impact around that time??

theabsolutetruth
Interesting. Thanks.

Perhaps we will be hearing more of these larger impacts given the area of solar system and galaxy we are entering.

www.universetoday.com...

I wonder if it could also have to do with the fact that we have a greater amount of resources making observations (greater amount of observation = more things seen).

For example, in the case of moon impacts, I think it could be that we have recently (in the past couple of decades) have spent much more time watching the Moon, and on a more consistent basis.

In the case of the increase in reports of bollides and fireballs entering Earth's atmosphere, there could be two factors at work:

First, there are more cameras watching. There has been a huge increase in the number of security and webcams that are going 24 hours a day, which makes it more likely that a fireball or bollide would be captured on film, and thus seen by many. Fewer security cameras/webcams in the past meant fewer fireballs being reported.

Secondly, with the instantaneous communication that is available with the internet, it is much more likely that people on one side of the world would be informed about a bollide on the other side of the world. In the past, information about a fireball seen over (say, for example, India or Eastern Russia) would not necessarily be known to the masses in North America or Europe.

In the past, a bollide/fireball seen by people (even by many people) in one part of the world may have been known to the rest of the world only to people who track such things, or maybe it would have been mentioned in a scientific journal. Now, the whole world sees it on YouTube or hears about it in public message broads.

reply to post by Phage


NASA disagrees your post, as does the more recent research from Cardiff University Astrobiology.

The link you gave dates some unknown source (unknown academic credentials) from 1992.

The NASA report is from 1998.

The Professorial research at Cardiff University Astrobiology report is from 2008.

There are oscillations that are affecting the exact measurements of such galactic travel of the Solar System though there are various academic research papers that put the comet phase of the solar system's journey in the 'soon' category. However 'soon' could be now or in a million years or longer.

However the research on the link from CU Astrobiology clearly defines as ''seminal''* and indicates:

Centre director Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said: “This is a seminal paper which places the comet-life interaction on a firm basis, and shows a mechanism by which life can be dispersed on a galactic scale.”

seminal
ˈsɛmɪn(ə)l/Submit
adjective
1.
strongly influencing later developments.
"his seminal work on chaos theory"
synonyms: influential, formative, groundbreaking, pioneering, original, creative, innovative;

www.giss.nasa.gov...

To predict the length of time between the Solar System's crossings of the galactic plane, astronomers have had to gauge the up-and-down motion statistically, using the numbers and the velocities of many sample stars distributed above and below the plane. The mathematical analysis then yields as a final result both the period of the up-and-down motion and the space density of matter in the flat galactic disk. In the same way that a pendulum swings much faster on Earth than in a low-gravity environment, such as an Earth-orbiting spacecraft, the surprisingly large space density found in the galactic disk gives the Solar System an unexpectedly short up-and-down period of 30 to 35 million years. This new measurement agrees uncannily well with the known impact cratering period on Earth. And it is likely that another big impact on Earth will happen sometime soon, at least within the next million years, because the inner Solar System seems to be in a comet shower now.

pubs.giss.nasa.gov...

Impact cratering on the Earth over the past 600 Myr has been partly sporadic, partly episodic. The episodic component is suspected to have been cyclical, with a mean period of ~32 Myr. According to a theory proposed to explain this phenomenon, gravitational encounters between the Solar System and interstellar clouds of intermediate to large size occasionally disturb the outer Solar System comets, with the consequence that some of these comets fall into the inner regions of the system, where a few hit the Earth. Because the episodes of impact cratering, however, are not precisely periodic, the galactic mechanism must be in part stochastic. The irregular part can be attributed to the randomness in the local space distribution of the interstellar clouds (and various other perturbing galactic objects). The periodic component probably arises from the harmonic oscillation of the Sun about the galactic plane, since the large-scale space density of the interstellar clouds and other objects falls off with increasing distance from the plane. A new study of the observational evidence is presented here. Contrary to a claim by Thaddeus and Chanan, the vertical scale height of the clouds seems to be sufficiently small and the Sun's vertical trajectory sufficiently large for the modulating effect of the Sun's galactovertical motion to be detectable in the terretrial record of impact cratering with at least a 50% a priori probability.

jimmyx
maybe the last race of humanoids got off earth before the last impact, and then when earth physically healed, they came back to a planet where the only species of animal that was as close a match to them was the ape. they inserted their own humanoid strands into the DNA of these primitive apes, and the evolution of man began. they have come back from time to time, and were considered god(s)....

What would be the purpose? To play God?

Seems like maybe they would've wanted to occupy the planet, set up an outpost here or whatever rather than just leave their DNA behind. Of course, if true, they would be a lot more advanced than I am so what do I know?

I have just always wondered about the "alien left their DNA behind and we were the result" theories.

reply to post by skyblueworld

So I'm wondering why this news only surfaced today (I don't know if it did), but it's the first I heard of it.

this happened back in Sept 2013...

And it was all over the news...

theabsolutetruth
NASA disagrees your post, as does the more recent research from Cardiff University Astrobiology.

The link you gave dates some unknown source (unknown academic credentials) from 1992.

The NASA report is from 1998.

Actually NASA's own fireball data confirms that the vast majority of (if not all) fireballs are not caused by objects from outside the solar system. Any object from outside the solar system would be going a lot faster than a normal fireball causing object that is in orbit around the Sun.

The larger the orbit the higher the velocity basically:

Objects which orbit the Earth have velocities of between 1-10 km/s.

Objects which orbit the Sun range in velocity from 10-72 km/s.

Objects from outside the solar system have even more extremely large orbits and therefore even more extremely large velocities. (Can you see the pattern here?)

NASA's cameras record the speed of the fireballs they capture, and you can check their archives here to see if any fireballs are outside the 10-72 km/s range that all objects in solar orbits fall within. Can you find a single one?

I've not come across much info on intergalactic meteoroids, but here we have one which was detected and was traveling at 300 km/s:

On July 28, 2006 the 6-m telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences recorded the spectrum of a faint meteor. We confidently identify the lines of FeI and MgI, OI, NI and molecular-nitrogen N_2 bands. The entry velocity of the meteor body into the Earth's atmosphere estimated from radial velocity is equal to 300 km/s. The body was several tens of a millimeter in size, like chondrules in carbon chondrites. The radiant of the meteor trajectory coincides with the sky position of the apex of the motion of the Solar system toward the centroid of the Local Group of galaxies.

Source: Detection of an intergalactic meteor particle with the 6-m telescope

And it's not just NASA that is capable of measuring the velocities of fireballs. Fireball camera networks are springing up all over the world, and doing just the same, like this example of fireball that was clocked at 16.3 km/s and caught on camera over the UK less than a week ago.

Hope that helps.

More reading:
A SEARCH FOR INTERSTELLAR METEOROIDS USING
THE CANADIAN METEOR ORBIT RADAR (CMOR

reply to post by FireballStorm


Actually the links from NASA and the Astrobiology lab are referring specifically to galactic travel of the solar system in cycles of 30-36 million years, NASA hasn't been around that long to measure those comets from the previous cycle. However it is placing the next cycle as within a million years so whilst it might not be occurring yet, it is foreseen as within the million years, possibly sooner.

Later rather than sooner is preferable, unless it is intelligent enough for wiping out just evil, then sooner is better.

ETA:

If you are disputing the reports from both NASA and the Astrobiology faculty research then I suggest you call THEM, instead of asking me to dispute it.

reply to post by theabsolutetruth

The link you gave dates some unknown source (unknown academic credentials) from 1992.

How about these credentials?
science.jpl.nasa.gov...

However the research on the link from CU Astrobiology clearly defines as ''seminal''* and indicates:

Yes. Well, Wickramasinghe is somewhat well known for his hyperbole about his own work. And that statement seems to be more about his panspermia notions than cometary bombardment. Here's the paper in question:

Both the impact cratering record and the Sun’s position near the Galactic plane imply that we are in a bombardment episode now.

arxiv.org...


For the Sun's position Wickramasinghe references Joshi Y.C., 2007 who says:

After analysing these YOCs, we conclude that 17 ± 3 pc is the best estimate
for the z⊙.

arxiv.org...

z⊙ is the distance of the Sun above the galactic plane. The Sun is about 17 parsecs (55 light years) above the galactic plane and moving "north". We passed through it 2-3 million years ago and won't again for millions of more years. The reason Wickramasinghe thinks we are in a "bombardment episode" (he doesn't say we are nearing the galactic plane, he doesn't say we can expect an increase in impacts) is because, as explained in his paper, he thinks that the passage through the plane (quite a while ago), disrupts the orbits of objects (comets) in the Oort cloud.

Wickramasinghe does not say we are entering the galactic plane. Wickramasinghe does not say that asteroidal impacts (such as the one on the Moon) increase as a result of the passage of the Sun through the galactic plane.


And to get back to your post:

Perhaps we will be hearing more of these larger impacts given the area of solar system and galaxy we are entering.

This lunar impact was not particularly large. The object was about 1 meter in size.

reply to post by Phage


If you are disputing the reports from both NASA and the Astrobiology faculty research then I suggest you call THEM, instead of asking me to dispute it.

I like how there are billions of dollars worth of high quality camera equipment pointed towards the "heavens"

But.... all we ever get to see are videos and pictures taken with, what seems like, a cell phone from the early 2000's...............

reply to post by theabsolutetruth

If you are disputing the reports from both NASA and the Astrobiology faculty research then I suggest you call THEM, instead of asking me to dispute it.

I'm not disputing them. I'm disputing that they support your statement:

Perhaps we will be hearing more of these larger impacts given the area of solar system and galaxy we are entering.

1) I'm pointing out that they do not say that the Sun is approaching the Galactic plane.
2) I'm pointing out that they do not say there is any reason to expect an increase in asteroidal impacts.
3) I'm pointing out that they do not say there is any reason to expect an increase in the number of comets entering the inner solar system or cometary impacts.