Viral Video of an Asteroid Exploding on the Moon is Fake

A viral video of an asteroid dramatically hitting the Moon has all the trappings of a fraud.

The video came across PetaPixel‘s desk after Daily Mail published it last week on its Daily Mail World YouTube channel, which has nearly five million subscribers and hosts many of the publication’s long-form stories alongside the occasional viral video.

The exciting video proclaims to be from a “lucky [amateur] astronomer” who saw an asteroid hitting the Moon through their telescope. A red circle shows the purported asteroid striking the lunar surface, with an immediate and dramatic cloud of dust emanating from the impact. The video goes a bit further, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime moment captured on camera, and in typical short-form content fashion, “A surreal moment of astronomical history.”

While Daily Mail does not offer much by way of credit, beyond a generic username, the video can be traced back to the photo and video licensing platform, Newsflare, which outlets like Daily Mail can use to find content to share.

The Newsflare page details that the video was captured by TikTok user @stargazingwithmichael, whose original video on TikTok has nearly 700,000 views.

Stargazingwithmichael says the video was filmed through his telescope in the early hours of May 2 — 2:32 AM CDT — in Joplin, Missouri.

“I couldn’t believe what I witnessed, then I was on cloud 9 to actually see an asteroid hit the moon, which happens almost every day from my research of how craters were formed over a billion years ago,” Michael told Newsflare, per the video’s listing.

“Filming through his telescope in the early hours of May 2, 2025, at 2:32 a.m. CDT, Michael noticed a bright object streaking toward the lunar surface. As he kept his focus, the impact unfolded before his eyes. He could hardly believe his luck, calling the experience an unreal moment of astronomical history,” Newsflare writes.

However, something about the video immediately felt off — it does not look right. The alleged asteroid is massive, and the dust cloud forms across a staggering area at an impossible pace.

It is not that an asteroid striking the Moon is itself unbelievable; quite the contrary, in fact, as objects strike the Moon often.

In 2022, Live Science quoted NASA’s head of the Meteoroid Environment Office, Bill Cooke, as estimating that probably about 100 ping pong ball-sized meteoroids hit the Moon every day. Admittedly, that’s a small object — much smaller than what is shown in the video above.

Sometimes even larger objects hit the Moon. About once every four years, a large — 2.5-meter (eight-foot) — object hits the Moon with the force of a kiloton, or about 1,000 tons of TNT, per Cooke. The pockmarked lunar surface is ample evidence that the Moon gets hit with objects of diverse sizes quite frequently.

Unsurprisingly, NASA studies lunar impacts and monitors the Moon’s surface. Meteoroids can hit the Moon with incredible speed upwards of 72 kilometers per second, or about 160,000 miles per hour. This results in impacts on the Moon producing a bright flash of light, which can sometimes be observed from Earth.

Real, observed lunar impacts are less dramatic than Michael’s alleged sighting, as demonstrated in the NASA video below.

The new video also looks nothing like the one below, captured by Japanese astronomer Daichi Fujii in 2023.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and other telescopes, both terrestrial and in orbit, are constantly watching the Moon. If an asteroid large enough to create visible dust on the Moon did strike the lunar surface on May 2 at 2:32 AM CDT, there would be more documentation about it.

PetaPixel contacted NASA to ask, “Did this really happen?”

“NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has not observed an asteroid impact to the Moon this week. Given the size of the depicted impact, we would also expect Earth-based telescopes to resolve it. The video is inconsistent with previous observed asteroid impacts to the Moon as it does not have the bright flash we typically see and the object does not appear to be moving at a rate we’d typically observe,” says Dr. Noah Petro, the Project Scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While Dr. Petro stops short of saying exactly this, the viral video is fake. The asteroid’s apparent speed, size (which is absurdly large, by the way), and the nature with which it strikes the Moon do not align with NASA’s extensive observations. It doesn’t look quite right because it isn’t right. A “once in a lifetime” astronomical event is undoubtedly much easier to “observe” when it’s not real.

Image credits: Featured image created using a screenshot from the faked asteroid video.