Two meteors, one Moon: Japanese astronomer captures breathtaking cosmic moment

In a rare event, two bright meteors were seen hitting the Moon’s surface just days apart — captured on video by Japanese astronomer Daichi Fujii, curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum. The flashes, seen on October 30 and November 1, were visible from Earth for only a split second but amazed astronomers around the world.

Fujii recorded the impacts using cameras pointed at the Moon’s darker side, showing quick but powerful bursts of light as the space rocks crashed into the surface at very high speeds. According to Space.com, the first flash appeared east of the Gassendi Crater, and the second was spotted west of Oceanus Procellarum, one of the Moon’s largest plains.

“A lunar impact flash appeared last night as well! This is the flash at 20:49:19.4 on November 1, 2025 (270fps, 0.03x speed playback),” Fujii wrote in a post on X. “Since the Moon has no atmosphere, meteors cannot be seen, and it lights up at the moment a crater is formed.”

 

 

 

 

 

The first strike happened at 8:30 p.m. Japan Standard Time (6:30 a.m. EST) on October 30, and the second at 8:49 p.m. JST (6:49 a.m. EDT) on November 1. Fujii said the timing matches the active period of the Southern and Northern Taurid meteor showers, which usually peak in early November.Based on his study, the October 30 meteoroid was likely from the Taurid meteor stream, hitting the Moon at about 27 kilometers per second (around 60,000 mph) and at an angle of 35 degrees. It weighed around 0.2 kilograms (0.4 pounds) and created a crater about three meters wide, producing a flash that lasted only 0.1 seconds.

Speaking to Space.com, Fujii said, “The pixels were saturated, so it’s possible the flash was even brighter than the recorded data suggests.” He added, “The luminous surface ratio was as high as 78%, but a thick moon also has the advantage of allowing more observation time.”

Fujii, who has become one of the leading recorders of lunar impact flashes, has been observing them for more than a decade. “I started observing lunar impact flashes around 2011 and have been continuously observing since 2020,” he said. “With my 20 cm telescope, I typically detect about one impact flash every few dozen hours of observation. Because the thin crescent Moon is visible only briefly and often low in the sky where thin clouds are common, I only observe a few dozen flashes per year.”

So far, Fujii has recorded about 60 such flashes, each helping scientists understand how space rocks hit and shape the Moon.

Unlike Earth, which has a thick atmosphere to burn up most meteors before they reach the surface, the Moon has almost no atmosphere. This means meteoroids strike it directly at speeds of 20 to 72 kilometers per second (45,000 to 160,000 mph) — even small rocks can create massive craters. NASA says a rock weighing about 5 kilograms (11 pounds) can create a crater more than nine meters (30 feet) wide and throw up over 75 tons of dust and rock.

These two recent impacts show that the Moon is still regularly hit by space debris — something scientists must consider as space agencies prepare for longer missions and future human bases there. Researchers are now waiting for new high-resolution images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to identify the fresh craters and study them in more detail.