Jupiter Impact!
Author: Tom
Comments(18)
Comments(18)
Jupiter Impact! WOW! Click for a larger version Image: Anthony Wesley
You can see the black smudge in this image from Anthony Wesley from Murrumbateman, Australia. Apparently the spot has been confirmed by NASA.
Head on over here for the Discovery site (mirror) and to Spaceweather.com.
All I can really say is WOW!
What a thrill for Anthony to have discovered this! It’s great to have the Shoemaker/Levy images to compare to this, so it can be estimated what/how large the object was that impacted Jupiter.
What caused this? Can it happen to the earth?
“It’s been a whirlwind of a day, and this on the anniversary of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Apollo anniversaries is amazing.”
Coincidence??? Mmmmm
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_music.cfm?bandID=568253
You scooped this one Tom… good work ;^)
To Melissa: I haven’t seen anything yet about what caused this particular impact on Jupiter, but if it’s the same thing that hit Jupiter in 1994, it was a comet. A small comet is widely thought to have hit the Earth in 1908, though fortunately it struck a largely uninhabited area in Siberia (i.e., Tunguska). So yes, it can happen to Earth. However, one idea making the rounds these days is that Jupiter, being a giant planet well out from the Sun, performs a public service by attracting the majority of comets that might otherwise wreak havoc in the inner Solar System where we are. If the comet that hit Jupiter in 1994 had hit us instead, it would have been pretty disastrous, but Jupiter was there to take that bullet for us.
1) Why is the spot color black? Is the surface covered with black soil?
2) We’re seeing the top of a cloud of debris and not the surface, yes?
Thanks, all. And thanks, Tom for a great site!
Launch pad
Home of single, swinging, astronauts.
Spacesuit
Cut to accommodate one’s space-helmet.
Launch window
Important to make sure this is shut.
Retro rockets
They’re slightly flared.
Solid-fuel booster
“You’re much better than that liquid fuel, you really are.”
Module
Part of the course: “How To Be An Astronaut”.
[...] vi en Tom’s Astronomy Blog gracias a un tweet de WebPartner Astronomy. También nos escribieron kroatonthejoker y Juan Ignacio [...]
[...] vi en Tom’s Astronomy Blog gracias a un tweet de WebPartner Astronomy. También nos escribieron kroatonthejoker y Juan Ignacio [...]
The amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, a 44-year-old computer programmer from Australia, made the discovery “using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope.”
[...] vi en Tom’s Astronomy Blog gracias a un tweet de WebPartner Astronomy. También nos escribieron kroatonthejoker y Juan Ignacio [...]
Dear David,
Jupiter doesn’t have a “surface” for us to be seeing; my guess is that the spot is darker than its surroundings because different, darker-colored gases are being churned to the surface. (But that’s just a guess.) If you look at infrared pictures of the impact site, it glows a brilliant white, because of the heat generated when the comet plowed into Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Yes and what a discovery it was!!!
As memory serves (and someone can jump in and correct me too)
The clouds are basically East/West bands.
Dark Bands and Bright Zones
Belts are high pressure/high temperature. Really we are looking down into gaps of the clouds and seeing lower into the atmosphere, and the colors are from organics and polysulfides
and
Zones are low pressure/low temperature. They are the tops of high ice clouds, well ammonia, methane and maybe water ice crystals and they lak the organics and polysulfides.
of course when I say high temperature, that’s a relative term the top of the ice clouds are something in the order of roughly -280 F to -200 F or about -173 C to -135 C, these are not exact numbers either, just off the top of my head.
Jupiter is pretty fascinating.
[...] vi en Tom’s Astronomy Blog gracias a un tweet de WebPartner Astronomy. También nos escribieron kroatonthejoker y Juan Ignacio [...]
“the result of an impact by a comet or asteroid, is as big as the Pacific Ocean”, astronomers report…
that some big impact
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_music.cfm?bandID=568253
here’s another pic
taken with 10′ at F/50
by Kfir from Ynet astronomy forum
http://prdupl02.ynet.co.il/ForumFiles_2/26692957.JPG
A rough guess why the spot is dark. The impactor vaporizes from friction and the heat dissociates elemental carbon from compounds both from the impactor and from the surrounding methane in Jupiter’s atmosphere. This carbon is like soot, very dark.