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Lunar Impact or Heavenly Coincidence
A young scientist challenges the notion that medieval eyewitnesses saw a huge meteor slam into the moon.
by Paul Morledge
View of Giordano Bruno crater as seen by Apollo 8 astronauts.
NASA
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Another view of Giordano Bruno crater, shot by the orbiting Clementine spacecraft.
NASA
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A planetary science student has used a little common sense and some basic physics calculations to challenge the theory that eyewitnesses in the 12th century saw the explosive lunar impact responsible for the moon’s 14-mile-wide Giordano Bruno crater.
The moon’s famously pockmarked surface is testimony to the assaults it has endured through billions of years of crashing meteors and asteroids. Most of these impact craters are millions to billions of years old, carved out by whirling space debris from when the solar system was still growing. But the Giordano Bruno crater — named for the 16th century Italian monk and philosopher known for his heretical views and eventually burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition — shows all the signs of being astronomically recent.
“Based on its extensive pattern of bright rays and uneroded morphology, Giordano Bruno is the youngest lunar crater of its size,” says Paul Withers, a graduate student in the Department of Lunar and Planetary Science at the University of Arizona.
Because of the crater’s apparent youthfulness, it became popular a few years back for astronomers to speculate on how old it really was. In 1976, planetary geologist Jack Hartung, formulated what has since been known as Hartung’s Hypothesis, which claims that the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater was witnessed and recorded on June 18, 1178 AD.
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Lunar impact or coincidence?
Astronomy.com: Tom Ford
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The event, claimed Hartung, was described in a passage from the medieval chronicles of Gervase of Canterbury (a monk and medieval version of reporter) that spoke of five eyewitnesses seeing the crescent moon “spewing out fire, hot coals and sparks….The body of the moon, which was below writhed, throbbed like a wounded snake.”
Withers thinks that the one- to two-mile-wide meteor that created the Giordano Bruno crater would do more than just dent the moon. In fact, his calculations indicate that nearly a week after this lunar impact, nearly 10 million tons of lunar ejecta would have showered down on Earth’s atmosphere at a rate of 50,000 meteors an hour. Such a meteor storm would have been of epic proportion.
"I calculate that this would cause a week-long meteor storm potentially comparable to the peak of the 1966 Leonids storm,” says Withers. "And they would be very bright, very easy to see, at magnitude 1 or magnitude 2. It would have been a spectacular sight to see! Everyone around the world would have had the opportunity to see the best fireworks show in history.”
Yet, according to Withers, there are no historical accounts of such a grandiose sky event. He searched far and wide through European, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Korean astronomical archives, but came across nothing.
So Withers looked to a 1977 scientific paper in the journal Meteoritics for an explanation of the passage found in the chronicles of Gervase of Canterbury. This report claims that what the five eyewitnesses saw was a heavenly coincidence.
"I think they happened to be at the right place at the right time to look up in the sky and see a meteor that was directly in front of the moon, coming straight towards them," says Withers. "And it was a pretty spectacular meteor that burst into flames in the Earth's atmosphere — fizzling, bubbling, and spluttering. If you were in the right one- to two-kilometer (1 mile) patch on Earth's surface, you'd get the perfect geometry.”
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04/20/2001
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