Pow! That would be the sound of a giant rock smacking into the moon (if the moon had any atmosphere to carry the sound, of course). But you can imagine the burst coming from the explosion in the video above, the biggest lunar impact ever observed from Earth.

Our natural satellite gets pummeled fairly regularly by tiny micrometeorites and occasionally by bigger space rocks. In May 2013, scientists recorded what was then the biggest explosion that had been seen on the moon when a 40-kilogram boulder slammed into the lunar surface at about 90,000 kph. Now, telescopes have recorded the impact from a meteorite weighing 10 times as much, whose flash was briefly as bright as the light from Polaris, the north pole star. The burst occurred on Sept. 11, 2013 in a area on the moon called Mare Nubium and was probably created by a meteor between 0.6- and 1.4-meters wide. The impact generated a crater with a diameter of around 40 meters.

Knowing how often such collisions happen on the moon could be important for future lunar explorers, one reason why NASA has set up a specific program to study them. This campaign started in 2005 and has already proved that lunar impacts happen about 10 times more frequently than scientists previously expected. Because the moon is our next-door neighbor, this finding suggests that the Earth might get hit more often than we previously thought by objects of a similar size.

Videos: Jm Madiedo/Youtube 1) & 2)

Homepage image: NASA