![]() “There is a run to the moon going on now, this time to stay,” says Kayal. Besides understanding the origin of TLP as it relates to planetary science and possibly shed light on the origins of the moon, there are some practical implications to consider as well. A color camera, says Cook, could help in pointing out subtle differences between the flashes.Īnd this study of these flashes is coming at possibly the most opportune and significant moment. “It would be a really great resource to help check out any future amateur astronomer reports of TLP that we receive from time to time.” While he believes the current specifications are limited, he’s encouraged by the improvements that could be made to the telescopes. ![]() “I’m really excited to see how Kayal’s project goes,” says Cook. ![]() But we have students who can help to improve the software within their study.” As the project is not third party-funded yet and only funded by the resources of the university itself, there is not very much manpower for the software. “We already have a basic version which works but there are improvements necessary. “One main task for us is to further develop our software for the detection of the events with as low false alarm rates as possible,” says Kayal. ![]() As the software makes more observations, it will learn how to better distinguish lunar flashes from light effects caused by terrestrial objects, like birds or airplanes. software tasked with automatically detecting flashes and other light phenomena. The two telescopes will constantly scan the surface of the moon each night, and when both cameras see a luminous event, the system sends the data straight to Kayal and his team.Įach computer is powered by A.I. He describes the new telescope as a “low budget system,” combining two telescope tubes on a single mount, both equipped with cameras connected to two different computers. And that’s where Kayal’s project comes in. More recently, the European Space Agency has operated its NELIOTA telescope since 2017, discovering there are far more flashes happening than we thought and they’re distributed more widely across the surface.īut the NELIOTA observations have helped to renew interest among scientists to study TLP. Tony Cook, a researcher based at Aberystwyth University in the UK who’s written about TLP, estimates that there’ve been about 3,000 reports of lunar flashes, although many have been made by amateur astronomers and inexperienced observers. A 1967 paper in the journal, Science was the first to label the observation as “lunar transient phenomena”. Over the next few decades, other astronomers using more powerful instruments would continue to see aberrations of light and brightness flicker off the surface of the moon. The first confirmed observation of TLP was in 1958 by a Russian astronomer. The most popular explanations for what’s causing this phenomena, says Kayal, are meteorite impacts the release of gas or vapors, perhaps through moonquakes, that can cloud the surface and reflect light abnormally electrostatic discharge due to interactions with the solar wind and light emission caused by rock fracturing. Though still underdevelopment, the system has been operational since April, and is already raising hopes that we’re on the cusp of solving a decades-long mystery of the moon. Hakan Kayal, an astronomer based at the University of Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, is currently in the midst of a project that might reveal what’s spurring these shifts in light and darkness on the moon, thanks to a new lunar telescope system run out of an observatory 60 miles north of Seville, Spain. We might finally have answers soon enough. Dubbed transient lunar phenomenon (TLP), we’ve seen it over and over and over, without any real understanding for its cause. Humans have claimed to witnessed this for at least a thousand years, and modern astronomers have documented the phenomenon since the latter half of the 20th century. Flashes of light will burst out momentarily, then vanish just as inexplicably fast. If you stare at the moon hard enough with a powerful telescope, you’ll notice something bizarre happening on the surface.
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