A mysterious green flash has bewildered an astronaut currently orbiting earth.

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick set up a timelapse to capture extraordinary footage of Earth from over North Africa, but when he reviewed the footage he discovered something out-of-this-world… literally.

The footage shows brilliant ‘paparazzi-like’ lights flicker across the continent, which are actually lightning storms – and they can be seen from space pretty much around the clock.

A bit of trivia for you, according to the Met Office, the UK’s national weather and climate service, thunderstorms are much more common than you’d think.

It wrote: “Thunderstorms are common occurrences on Earth. It is estimated that a lightning strike hits somewhere on the Earth’s surface approximately 44 times every second, a total of nearly 1.4 billion lightning strikes every year.”

So by the time you finish brushing your teeth – two minutes if you’re doing them right – lightning would have struck the ground somewhere on the planet more than 5,000 times.

The mysterious green flash starts to build in the timelapse (Twitter/@dominickmatthew)

But it wasn’t the storms that sparked the NASA astronaut’s curiosity, but a bolide.

Taking to Twitter, he wrote: “I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere – a rather bright one called a bolide.

“Timelapse is slowed down to one frame per second for you to see it streaking and then exploding.”

A bolide is an extremely bright meteor that explodes when it breaks into our planet’s atmosphere.

He continued: “Timelapse was setup over Northern Africa where it was very dark with lightning. I got greedy with ISO (25600) and when the timelapse got to Cairo the cities were overexposed.

It builds into a brilliant flash of light (Twitter/@dominickmatthew)

“I was greedy because I wanted the Milky Way Core. When I went to review the shots afterwards I found the bolide.”

He went on: “For those asking about date and time for meteor tracking: The meteor exploded on 2 Sept 2024 at 20:12:20 GMT based on the clock in the camera which may be off by 30s or so either side.”

In both recordings you can see the meteor hurtling towards Earth, before breaking through the planet’s atmosphere – at which point it bursts into flames over over Cairo, the capital city of Egypt.

The astronaut, who is part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission which saw him launch to the ISS in March, took to the social media platform to ask users: “If you know about these type of meteors please chime in. I am curious to know more.”

We’ll long be learning about planets and the solar system, but so far scientists have found some pretty amazing discoveries.

From finding planets twice the size of Earth and incomprehensibly large black holes, to the James Webb Space Telescope detecting light on an Earth-like planet, there’s no way of knowing what’s going to be identified next.

But one discovery of note in recent months was that of the remains of a ‘buried planet’ within Earth.

Seismologists discovered two continent-sized ‘basal mantle anomalies’ – blobs beneath the Earth’s crust to you and me – beneath the Pacific and Africa.

They’re denser than their surroundings which suggests they’re made out of different material to the rest of the Earth’s mantle – and now we might have a good idea of how they got there.

The researchers reckon it could be due to a planet called Theia smashing into the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, with the impact forming the Moon.

In a theoretical article published to Nature, eleven writers put forward evidence that this different mantle within our Earth could be an ancient planet that crashed into Earth, forming the Moon out of its flying pieces.

By observing the anomalies in the Earth’s mantle and comparing them to matter surrounding them, the researchers suggest that they may be buried remnants of Theia mantle material that has been preserved deep in the Earth billions of years after the Moon-forming impact.

Theia could have smashed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago. (ARTUR PLAWGO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty)

The research team used giant-impact simulations which were able to show that a part of Theia’s mantle could have entered proto-Earth’s lower mantle.

They could see that Theia would have had a higher density as the Moon is more iron-rich.

This means that if there are samples that match the density and composition of Theia within the Earth, it proves the theory that Theia once crashed into Earth which created our Moon.

The team wrote that Theia’s matter surviving deep within Earth would ‘be a natural consequence of the Moon-forming giant impact’.

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They concluded in the study: “Because giant impacts are common at the end stages of planet accretion, similar mantle heterogeneities caused by impacts may also exist in the interiors of other planetary bodies.”

The revelation left those of us who don’t have astrophysics PhDs scratching their heads.

One commenter marvelled at the time: “The Earth kinda is like a lava lamp. Only it takes really long for the blobs to move around.

“I remember watching a documentary about what’s going on below Yellowstone and the grand Tetons and they also basically said what’s going on below is kind of like a lava lamp.”

I mean, that’s one way of looking at it.

A space expert has revealed exactly how many of the six USA flags Nasa believes are still standing on the moon.

On July 21 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first and second men to walk on the Moon.

To mark the success of their Apollo 11 mission, the pair planted a pole seven inches deep into the lunar surface before raising up and saluting a nylon US flag.

It’s said tha Nasa had been inspired to have its astronauts plant a flag on the first landing upon hearing former President Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1969.

Since then, five more American banners have been erected on the moon – one for each US Apollo landing.

But what has happened to the six markers over the years and are any of them still standing?

According to astrophotographer Robert Reeves, not all have stood the test of time.

LRO has captured images depicting the shadows of three Moon-based flags. (Nasa)

Taking to YouTube to share his expertise, the astronomy expert began by explaining why it is so difficult to pinpoint the fate of these pennants.

“The Moon is about a quarter million miles away. The smallest objects on the Moon that can be seen with any Earthbound telescope, even the largest research telescope, are only a little under a mile across.

“Since the flags left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts are only about four feet wide, unfortunately, they’re a thousand times smaller than what we can spot from the Earth.

“Not even the powerful Hubble Space Telescope can see the flags.”

Though we can’t see the flags from Earth, there is a way that Nasa can track whether they’re still standing, says Reeves.

Introducing Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO): a robotic spacecraft that has orbited the Moon since 2009.

The space agency has revealed that in recent years LRO has captured images showing the shadow of flags posted on the Apollo 12, 16 and 17 missions.

So three of the six are thought intact, but what about the others?

The original flag erected in 1969 is no longer standing. (Bettmann/Contributor/Getty)

Unfortunately, LRO has been unable to locate the makers at the Apollo 14 and 15 sites.

“Scientists believe those flags weren’t just bleached, but their nylon was completely disintegrated by solar ultraviolet radiation,” Reeves explained in his YouTube video.

Therefore, the status of the 1971 Apollo 14 and 15 flags remains inconclusive.

The expert then went on to reveal the fate of the first banner planted by Armstrong and Aldrin.

The moonwalkers placed the Apollo 11 flag 27 feet from the Lunar Lander Eagle’s centerline.

Thus, the flagpole didn’t withstand the rocket exhaust of liftoff, writes Celestron.

The good news is that the nylon flag could one day be recovered as experts believe it would have been preserved by being buried beneath moon dust.

However, as the last crewed Nasa Appolo mission to the moon was in December 1972, it could be some time before the hypothesis is proved correct.