A mysterious space object may have just made an impact with Saturn. Though approximately seven comets or asteroids hit Saturn each year, this could be the first instance where such an event has been captured on camera.

Mysterious Object Hits Saturn

A NASA employee and amateur astronomer named Mario Rana has recorded images of the Saturn impact. Rana contributes to a project called DeTeCt, which attempts to spot planetary impacts by using software to analyze images of Saturn and Jupiter.

According to MSN, studies suggest large objects – measuring over a kilometer across – only strike Saturn once every 3,125 years on average. Researchers will verify impacts by showing that the same flash was captured in data on different telescopes.

According to Ricardo Hueso at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, who also works on DeTeCt, researchers are working to determine whether the data is the “signature of a faint impact or if it is just a noisy pixel in the camera”.

“If only one person sees this flash – and that’s where we’re at the minute – there’s still a very high chance it won’t be real. It’ll just be a speckle in their observations,” Leigh Fletcher at the University of Leicester, UK, said to New Scientist. “If somebody else saw the same flash, fantastic, we’ve got an impact.”

Mark Norris at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, says that the popularity of astronomy as a hobby and the quality of modern telescopes bode well. “There’s a fair chance out there that someone has something that they either haven’t looked at yet, or they just discounted it as a problem they were having,” he says.

Though the impact could be verified, the lack of information about the object limits the potential to study it. The Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory, or PVOL, a consortium of professional and amateur astronomers, has asked experts in the field to attempt to confirm or refute the potential impact on Saturn and to submit any captured observations.