Canterbury Cathedral was part of St. Augustine’s Abbey, a monastery founded in 598 A.D. It endured Viking raids, William the Conqueror’s invasion, a large fire (in 1168), and the murder of its archbishop, Thomas a Becket, and was finally done in by Henry VIII. But possibly the most important event in its long history was something happened on a summer night in June in 1178.
That night, “after sunset when the moon was first seen,” five monks were sitting outside looking at the sky and the crescent moon when the upper part of the horn “suddenly split in two. From the midpoint of this division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out fire, hot coals, and sparks. The body of the moon writhed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed it proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon, from hook to horn, that is, along the whole length, took on a blackish appearance.”
The five monks told Gervase of Canterbury, the chronicler of the Abbey, what they’d seen, and he wrote it all down, adding that the monks were “prepared to stake their honor on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the narrative.” Unfortunately, they were the only people to have seen it. According to European chroniclers of the time, the continent was “fogged in” that night, so the five Canterbury monks were the only witnesses, and nobody paid any attention to their account for nearly eight hundred years, at which point geologist Jack B. Hartung proposed a theory for what they might have seen: a giant asteroid slamming into the moon.
If it had, there should be a crater at the place the monks described the explosion as being, so Hartung went about looking for one–and found a likely candidate: Crater Giordano Bruno (named after Bruno, the first person martyred for science in 1600.) The crater was fourteen miles in diameter and on the far side of the moon, but in a place near the edge where the explosion could have been seen. And it was very young, as determined by the spectacular rays radiating from it. In the case of older craters, the rays have been hit repeatedly by other, smaller asteroids which throw up dust and obscure the rays. Crater Giordano Bruno’s rays were sharp, clear, and very long, all of which suggested it was the Moon’s youngest crater.
Hartung deduced that the flames the monks saw were a plume of molton matter rising from the surface and that the illusion of the Moon’s breaking in two could have come from the resultant dust cloud obscuring the Moon. Hartung also deduced that if the Moon had been hit, it should still have a slow longitudinal wobble like a bell’s ringing (which it did) and an elevated temperature (which it didn’t), but scientists concluded that an asteroid impact on the surface of the Moon was most likely what the monks had seen.
Then in 2001, Paul Withers, a graduate student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab, said an asteroid impact was impossible. The crater was much older (1 to 10 million years old) and, besides, if an asteroid HAD hit the Moon, it would have thrown up enormous amounts of dirt and rock, and there would have been a giant meteor shower afterwards consisting of up to 50,000 asteroids an hour, which would have lasted for weeks, and no observers had mentioned one. Withers also argued that if an asteroid had hit the moon that Korean or Chinese astronomers should have seen it (though I don’t think that works because of when the impact occurred.)
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Withers argued that what the monks had actually seen was a very large asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere that had burst into flames as it did, “fizzing and bubbling and sputtering,” and that it just happened to be aligned with the Moon so that it looked like the Moon was exploding. (Personally, I find the chances of that exact alignment with the monks’ line of sight happening even more unlikely than their happening to see an asteroid hit the Moon.)
Other scientists weighed in, saying they couldn’t possibly have seen the Moon because it would have been invisible at sunset from Canterbury on the eighteenth of June (I’d like to point out that Gervase never said “just after sunset,” he said, “after sunset when the moon was first seen,” which is an entirely different thing,) and others claimed the monks had made the whole thing up and were just talking about Islam being defeated in the Crusades, since Islam’s symbol is the crescent moon, even though the monks never said a word about Islam OR the Crusades, and this was the only thing like this that the reported seeing.
In 2008 the Japanese satellite SELENE took high-resolution photos of the crater, which scientists used to attempt to date the crater by counting the smaller craters in it. They came up with a probable age of one million to ten million years and concluded the chances of its being a mere eight hundred years old were .1 per cent.
The only way to definitely prove whether those monks saw an asteroid hit the Moon is by going to Crater Giordano Bruno, collecting rock samples, and carbon-dating them, but in the meantime there have been several asteroid impacts recorded on the Moon that were visible to the naked eye–one on March 17, 2013, another on February 24, 2014, and, most recently, one on June 21, 2019 during a total lunar eclipse, all of which produced a blinding flash. “It was so bright!” Bill Cook of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office said. None of these were even close to the size of the asteroid that created Giordano Bruno. The largest was fifteen meters across, and Bruno is fourteen MILES across, and yet they were easily visible from earth, which makes the monks’ story more plausible.
Stay tuned. Personally, I’m rooting for the monks, but we shall see…
Connie Willis