Transient lunar phenomenon events recorded on October 30th and November 1st.
No citation, but I believe it’s been said that without the moon around to deflect meteor strikes that might otherwise have hit Earth, we’d be in an awful lot of trouble.
By just what mechanism is the Moon supposed to deflect any meteor strikes?
Also, I hate to break it to you, but, statistically, if you wait long enough Earth is still in a lot of trouble, although multi-gigaton city busters (let alone extinction-level impact events) are infrequent on the scale of human lifetimes or human history.
I mean, there are doubtless a few meteors that would have hit the Earth, but got diverted into a miss by the Moon’s gravity… but there would be nearly as many that would have missed, but got diverted into a hit. About the only way that the Moon would prevent impacts on net would be by directly physically shielding the Earth, and it’s an awfully small shield.
Is there a video at that link?? I saw nuthin’!
Yes. Two videos.
I didn’t see anything on that Mashable link except a big gray blob that lasted 5 seconds.
There are some videos of things hitting the moon, visible from the Earth even in the daytime, that were obviously photoshopped or CGI. And then there was the early 1990s comedy (“L.A. Story”, IIRC) where the moon was in the background, and a plane approached it and crashed into it.
There are two videos there. One shows a meteor impact as a fairly small bright spot that lasts for just a fraction of a second, in the lower part of the image. The second one (scroll down) is bigger and lasts longer.
The incredible energy of these impacts causes the material to become incendiary and glow brightly, and it’s amazing to be able to capture these phenomena.
Hit something with hammer, strike sparks. We just struck biggest sparks in history of mankind.
Don’t the large gas giant planets take a bunch of hits for us?
Well, they definitely take a lot of hits (back at Shoemaker-Levy 9, I saw a NASA poster that described it as a “once in a thousand lifetimes event”. Someone didn’t do their homework.). “For us” is a lot harder to pin down. Most of the hits they take are comets, and most of those pass through the inner solar system only very rarely (sometimes only once). Take any given comet that hit Jupiter, and if it hadn’t, by far the most likely outcome is that it wouldn’t hit anything at all.
Space is big, and anything that isn’t empty space is an awfully small target.
“Space is big . You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”