The mystery Stuart Crater on the Moon which took 50 years to resolve

Imagine the situation: Year 1953 and penchant for observing space. Suddenly a flare on the Moon that occurs consensus photograph.

This was what happened to Dr. Leon Stuart, a doctor in Tulsa (Oklahoma) amateur stargazing. He was not the first to see something rare in our natural satellite because in the twelfth century the monks who watched England had "eruptions of fire" on the moon. Later, other fans have seen sometimes like these mysterious flashes.

The experts had dismissed these reports capo fans because they saw no evidence that anything should occur on the moon capable of producing the "flashes". They could be meteorites that touched the lunar orbit without more. But last year 2002 a NASA researcher gave good reason to Stuart.

The mystery of the Moon, confirmed 50 years later by NASA

Stuart said see, and came to photograph (as you can see in the picture above) a small white spot right in the center of the Moon, caused by an explosion on the lunar surface. This doctor was fond of observing the stars, but one night in November 1953 decided to add a camera to your telescope. By pure chance, he could capture the moment of the "explosion on the Moon". He even inThe Strolling Astronomer publish a newsletter of amateur astronomy in 1956.

As you can imagine, they took crazy, desacreditándole and claiming that what he saw was how a meteorite burning in the atmosphere of Earth. Although he died in 1968 still she convinced of what he had seen, and making their mark in astronomy circles: What you saw today is known as the "Event Stuart".

Fortunately, decades later, NASA researcher Bonnie Buratti thought the incident described by Stuart deserved to be investigated again. The first thing he thought was: "If something really happened, there must be a large crater in the area" and began to work looking for that signal.

Crater Stuart, confirmed by NASA

So, thanks to images collected in the 1990s, the mystery of the Moon was about to be resolved. Buratti decades of photos looking investigated the possible location of the crater and calculating how big it could be. As described by Stuart, the asteroid causing the white point was measured as an 18-wheeler.

With the help of a graduate student, Buratti searched through thousands of images craters on the lunar surface. Finally, thanks to the spacecraft Clementine, found an image of a crater sufficiently wide and in the appropriate location for which had described the amateur astronomer. His work was published in the journal Icarus.

Later, Paul Lowman, lunar geologist at NASA, has reviewed both findings Stuart such as Buratti, concluding that both were right and that this physician and amateur astronomer had witnessed the impact of a large asteroid on the surface of the moon.

Although today many astronomers still be convinced and believe that the explosion described Stuart should have been much larger in the picture, Buratti said the evidence supported him, and this indicates how valuable it is still the work of amateur astronomers .

All this was confirmed in 2002, and today we have bigger and better methods to analyze the stars whether we are fans like we're professionals. At the moment, in astronomical circles scar impact of this asteroid has a clear name, "Stuart Crater".