Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
Thousands of people were watching the total lunar eclipse on January 21 when something suddenly smacked into the moon, creating a flash of light.
Now professional and amateur astronomers have used fortuitous photographs of the strike to estimate the object’s size.Astronomer Jorge Zuluaga and his colleagues gathered images taken by amateurs in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, plus a video that was livestreamed on TimeAndDate.com from an observatory in Morocco, and calculated that the impact probably released the equivalent of about half a ton of TNT in energy.
That much energy could be released by an object of a size between a softball and a basketball,…
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