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A Spanish astronomer says he's witnessed a fridge-sized asteroid smash into the Moon, in the biggest lunar impact by a space rock ever recorded. The rare episode was seen by Jose Maria Madiedo, a professor at the University of Huelva, Britain's Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) said.
On September 11 last year, Madiedo was operating two lunar-observing telescopes when he spotted a flash in the Mare Nubium, an ancient, dark lava-filled basin. The flare would have been visible to the naked eye to anyone who happened to be looking at the Moon at that moment in good viewing conditions, the RAS said.
There followed a long afterglow, lasting another eight seconds -- the longest and brightest ever seen for a lunar impact.'At that moment, I realised that I had seen a very rare and extraordinary event,' Madiedo told the society.
Madiedo and his colleagues calculate that the rock had a mass of around 400kg, with a diameter of between 60cm and 1.40m.
It hit Mare Nubium at around 61,000 kilometres per hour.
The speed was so high that the rock turned molten on impact and vaporised, leaving a thermal glow visible from Earth as a flash, and causing a 40-metre crater in the Moon's pocked surface. The impact energy was equivalent to an explosion of around 15 tonnes of TNT, more than triple the largest previously seen event, claimed by NASA in March 2013. Madiedo's team calculate that rocks of this size may strike Earth about 10 times more frequently than was generally thought.
Earth, though, is protected by its atmosphere and asteroids of this size burned up as dramatic 'fireball' meteors.
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