On
this date in 1178, goes the report, five monks from Canterbury were
sitting around outside just after sunset, when suddenly they saw the
upper horn of the moon “split into two.” They saw “a flaming
torch” spring up from the middle of the split--”spewing out, over
a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks.” They say
that the moon looked normal again for a second, and then the whole
thing happened again, and again, twelve times in all—or maybe more!
Okay,
this happened more than 800 years ago, and we only know about it from
one guy's written description—and we also know that eyewitnesses
aren't very good at reporting what they saw even if it happened eight
minutes ago instead of eight centuries ago!
Still,
it has been suggested that the five Canterbury monks were watching
the moon being hit by a meteor shower, and the relatively new crater
Giordano Bruno being created.
However,
some scientists point out that the impact that created the
22-kilometer-wide crater would have kicked up a lot of debris, so the
Beta Taurids would've been joined by a week's worth of blizzard-like
meteors here on Earth—the kind of intense rockfall that has never
been recorded anywhere, anytime, in all of human history. If these
scientists are correct, then the Canterbury monks saw something very
different than the creation of the Giordano Bruno crater, after all.
It
could have been, instead, that the monks saw some meteors exploding
in the air—and that those exploding meteors just happened to be
lined up with the Moon when viewed from the monks' small corner of
Britain. That would certainly explain why no other skywatchers
recorded the same spectacular event!
Also
on this date:
No comments:
Post a Comment