Confirmed! Jupiter was Shot with an Asteroid

TextOn July 19, 2009, 15 years (to the day) after the famous comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 peppered Jupiter with huge chunks of ice, the gas giant was hit once again by a cosmic bullet. Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was the first to notice a scar in the planet's atmosphere after the fact, leading us to believe that Jupiter had been hit by another comet. However, in this cosmic game of whodunit, jumping to the conclusion that "another" comet was to blame for the 2009 impact turns out to have been a red herring. Just because we know a comet slammed into the planet in 1994, it doesn't necessarily mean the 2009 event used the same weapon. After some detective work, two papers recently published in the journal Icarus have concluded that Jupiter was actually shot by an asteroid, not a comet.
just goes to show you that one day it could be us that gets slammed with a asteroid!! sad it took that long to find out the truth that it was not a comet.

news.discovery.com...

edit on 28-1-2011 by matrix12 because: (no reason given)

Your link was broken
news.discovery.com...

cool story, funny how its almost routine after SL9..
Im also glad that Jupiter is doing her job and doing it well...

LOL....check what your link says:

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You catched just in time brother, good work.

ok i fixed the link i think, thanks for letting me know, and yep its a good thing that jupiter is there to get our backs !!

reply to post by matrix12

Yes, thank goodness Jupiter acts something like a giant vacuum cleaner to suck up a lot of these orbital hazards to keep many of them from hitting the Earth, but we still get a few like the meteor crater impact in Arizona 50,000 years ago, or the devastating Tunguska impact just over 100 years ago in Siberia.

However, what scientists are learning, is that the dividing line between comets and asteroids is not as black and white as they once thought.

In fact what they have learned is that bodies with varying amounts of water and other comet materials have somewhat blurred the distinction between asteroids and comets.

Well I guess we will see how good Jupiter is when Elenin
comes near this summer,.
or if the sun has the pull to keep it away from us

reply to post by Arbitrageur




Now if we can just find the large object at the edge of our solar system that is acting like a riding lawmower driving over gravel that keeps launching comets inbound. There is an article on this forum somewhere that was talking about the sun getting hit with like 10 comets in a very short time. While its not abnormal for the sun to have a comet hit (or get close before vaoprizing) the number is high for the time frame.

what really SHOCKS me is these planet killers (aka ) E.L.E
are only thought to accur once in every millions of years .
In other words the Russian one 100 years back is a every 5k year event the one that made a bad day for the dinos is a one in every millions of years event/.
so Jupiter being hit TWICE by BIG (big enough to create earth size holes in the atmosphere in ten years is unbelievable.
I was so excited by shoemaker lev we were SO lucky to have a probe there to photo the impact (if only at a bad angle ) like 6 or 7 pieces half mile wide and larger .
if that had been earth we would not be chating right now.
some ware out there is a rock-iceball with earths name writen all over it .
Its not a question of IF it will happen but WHEN it will happen. We are the first species EVER to have the ability to see our doom and try to change it and yet instead we create artificial doom in the form of nuks when we should be spending that money on plantery defenses .
every one needs to quite worrying about alien attacks and hows going to nuk who and think of the REAL threat to our sons and there sons before it to late.