Good find! I love hearing about these things. It always unsettles me though because I fear what would happen if one was to hit us. Seems they're catching a lot of those impacts on Jupiter lately and that's fine with me. Maybe they can use the images to study the movement and entry of the object and apply that to their research on coming up with ideas for deflection for our own planet.

Given that Jupiter is one of the solar systems vacuum cleaners, I'd imagine that these type of events happen more than we have been aware of in the past.

We are seeing more impacts simply because we are watching closer than every before. It took a massive event like Shoemaker-Levy 9 to finally get our attention.

IRM

Originally posted by InfaRedMan
Given that Jupiter is one of the solar systems vacuum cleaners, I'd imagine that these type of events happen more than we have been aware of in the past.

I would chalk it up to the advent of webcam luck imaging techniques for amateur astronomy. In the last ten years its resolution and popularity have increased to the point that we basically have almost around-the-clock monitoring of Jupiter by amateur astronomers. That's an entirely new phenomenon; professionals do not monitor the solar system's planets like that, and previously the best way to take pictures of the planets was with film, which would have missed this event entirely. That's actually how I started out in astrophotography; telescopic film pictures of the moon and planets. Video capturing to make stacked still pictures is the just about the only way anyone does it nowadays though, and that means lots of eyes on the scene; that's why not just one but two amateurs saw it simultaneously.

[edit on 4-6-2010 by ngchunter]