Texas Amateur Detects Possible Impact on Jupiter
martyb writes:
Texas Amateur Detects Possible Impact on Jupiter:
As Texas amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel looked up at the sky for Perseid meteors on Wednesday night (August 7th), little did he know his Celestron 8 telescope was capturing the possible impact of a much larger "meteor" at Jupiter. After running the camera data through a program designed to alert the user to just such transient events, Chappel spotted a flash of light in the planet's South Equatorial Belt (SEB). It expanded from a pinpoint to a small dot before fading away - telltale signs of a possible impact based on previous events observed at Jupiter.
[...] The flash appeared just inside the southern edge of the SEB on the same face of the planet as the Great Red Spot, at a longitude of 21.8 (System II) / 298.4 (System I) and latitude -19.6. Due to prevailing winds, any possible dark scar left in the wake of the impact will be slowly drifting westward, increasing in longitude by approximately 3.9 (System II) per day. The flash lasted between 0.88 and 1.55 seconds. Chappel favors the longer time frame.
[...] If confirmed this would be the 7th recorded impact at the solar system's biggest planet since July 1994, when 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into the planet in succession to create a rosary of dark impact boils visible in amateur telescopes. That event remains the single most impressive astronomical sight of my life. Additional crashes by either asteroids or comets were observed in 2009, 2010 (two events), 2016, and 2017.
Pics and a time-lapse of the impact are on the linked story's page.
Also at cnet which also notes:
Something remarkable to consider is that the apparent size of the flash is almost the size of Earth, which is tiny next to the giant gas planet. For reference, about three Earths could fit inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which is also visible.
Of course, this doesn't mean that whatever hit Jupiter was the size of a planet, just that the collision looks to have released a lot of explosive energy.
I wonder what things would be like if it had hit our Moon, instead?
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.