Monks may have witnessed a lunar impact
On this day · 18 June 1178
Five Canterbury witnesses swore the new Moon split and spat fire; centuries later, scientists are still arguing about what they saw.
About an hour after sunset on June 18, 1178, five men near Canterbury watched the upper horn of the thin crescent Moon appear to split in two. The monastery’s chronicler, Gervase, recorded that a flaming torch sprang from the gap, throwing out fire and sparks, and that the Moon “throbbed like a wounded snake.”
In 1976 a geologist proposed a dramatic explanation: the witnesses had seen the impact that gouged the lunar crater Giordano Bruno, one of the youngest large craters on the Moon.
A strike that fresh would have flung up a glowing plume, which fits the monks’ vivid description rather well.
The trouble is the silence. A blast that big should have triggered a week-long meteor storm visible across Earth, yet no Chinese, Arab, Japanese, or European chronicle records one. Many scientists now think the monks simply caught a meteor burning up directly in their line of sight to the Moon. A good story, in any case, survives a little doubt.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
