Did something just hit Saturn? See the image here!

Did something just hit Saturn?

Mario Rana, a long-time contributor to EarthSky Community Photos, was recording Saturn on the morning of July 5, 2025, when he captured what looks like a bright flash of light on the limb of the planet. Mario, who practices astrophotography from Hampton, Virginia, was recording Saturn between 5:00 and 5:15 a.m. that morning. His DeTeCt software scanned the video he took, finding this anomaly at approximately 5:07:56 EDT (9:07:56 UTC). And now the hunt is on for more observations to see if anyone else caught a bright flash on the same location on Saturn at the same time.

If you think you may have evidence of an impact on Saturn at this time, the Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory lays out the steps you should take to help confirm the event. You can find the information here.

Amplifying the call from Marc Delcroix and co. over the weekend: the team are looking to verify/refute a potential impact on #Saturn on July 5th, 09:00-09:15UT. Videos taken by amateur observers at that time might hold the key. This ? credit: Mario Rana

pvol2.ehu.eus/pvol2/news/v…

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— Leigh Fletcher (@leighfletcher.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 2:37 AM

Our solar system is a shooting gallery

While it would certainly be a rare event to see an impact on Saturn, it’s not unprecedented. In fact, our solar system contains much more than just the eight planets and assorted dwarf planets. From asteroid to grains of dust, there’s a lot of leftover debris from the formation of the solar system. And sometimes their orbits around the sun intersect with a wallop.

The impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter in 1994 was a showstopper. The comet broke into fragments, which then smashed into the giant planet one after the other, leaving behind bruises in the cloudtops. Occasionally we get to witness space rocks plow into the moon, including this one during a lunar eclipse in 2019. And debris hits Earth’s atmosphere every day, resulting in sporadic meteors. Sometimes, we even get hit by something large enough to reach the ground.

So did a space rock hit Saturn, creating the bright flash in Mario’s video? It’s certainly possible. We eagerly await confirmation!

Bottom line: Did something hit Saturn, resulting in a bright flash on July 5, 2025? Possibly! We await confirmation from other observers. Find out more here.

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