MADRID - As millions of stargazers around the world watched the super wolf blood moon on Sunday night, some noticed a small flash on the moon's surface, which a Spanish researcher said was caused by the impact of a meteorite.
"A rock hits the moon during the total eclipse," Jose Maria Madiedo, an astrophysicist of the University of Huelva in Spain, tweeted Tuesday. Attached to his tweet was a YouTube link displaying the impact flash during the lunar eclipse.
In the video, the lunar impact flash was spotted on the top-left half of the moon at 0441 GMT on Jan. 21 and was captured by telescopes operating in the framework of Spain's Moons Impacts Detection and Analysis System (MIDAS) Survey.
Madiedo said it's the first impact flash ever seen during a lunar eclipse, although such crater-forming impacts are common, the Associated Press reported.
Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles also recorded the impact during its livestream of the eclipse. A second flash was seen a minute after the first by some observers, Anthony Cook, an astronomical observer at Griffith, told AP.
The Impact of a small meteorite on the moon is generally hard to spot from the Earth as the ephemeral flash of light is often outshined by the bright moon light. Thus, Sunday's eclipse provided perfect conditions for astronomers to observe.
This is the first lunar eclipse in 2019 and happened at a time when the moon was also closest to the Earth. As the moon often takes on a reddish tone during a total lunar eclipse, the celestial event on Sunday was dubbed a super wolf blood moon. According to NASA, the next total lunar eclipse won't happen until 2021.
