Possible Asteroid impact on Jupiter

Possible Asteroid impact on Jupiter

www.acquerra.com.au

Possible fresh impact mark on Jupiter captured by Anthony Wesly in Australia, no News sources confirming this yet but his image clearly shows a impact mark on the planets surface.
Will hopefully find out a bit more as the European observatories train the telescopes on the planet soon.

(visit the link for the full news article)

-Breaking News coming from a Australian Space Observer.
As reported on the ALPO Jupiter list: July 19, 2009
Possible Meteorite or small Cometary debris hits Jupiter and leaves a Moon-Sized gaseous crater.
no News sources confirming this yet but his image clearly shows a impact mark on the planets surface.
Will hopefully find out a bit more as the European observatories train the telescopes on the planet soon

www.acquerra.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

I thought Jupiter was a giant ball of gas, and because of which doesn't have a surface.

Do you have a link to the article you linked to the picture.

Thats right, Jupiter is a Gas-planet therefore has no surface (that we know of.) The only reason the explosion didnt ignite the planet is because theres no Oxygen on Jupiter, otherwise the entire planet would literally burn itself out.
Heres a link to the Observers article posted upon his observation.

www.acquerra.com.au...

Would have been nice to see the actual strike itself like a probe was taking pics of the strike, but we can only use our imaginations

If there were life floating in certain layers of the Jovian atmosphere, I wonder how much this event would affect them globally.



[edit on 19-7-2009 by star in a jar]

Since Jupiter is a gas giant, where did the asteroid go, did it exit on the other side, break up, or did Jupiter absorb it like a sponge?

Simple.

Comet Shoemaker Levy -1994

Home Page

Links galore - geez

Perhaps my comment isn't as simple as I'm making it, so someone please feel free to tell me what I'm missing.

Jupiter isn't all that far away and is part of what i call the "monitored" planets -- meaning we have someone taking pictures of it all the time.

My question is: how the heck could they have not seen this asteroid approaching Jupiter long before it hit? I mean, they have lists and lists of asteroids and meteors that are "in Earth's path" that go from a potential collision a couple of years aways out to 150+ years away.

This makes me question how possible it really is for an undetected asteroid/meteor to strike Earth without all these experts seeing it coming before it's too late.

I'm not saying one is going to hit anytime soon, but I guess i'm a little disappointed that they don't have things as covered "up there" as I had thought.

Originally posted by Hastobemoretolife
I thought Jupiter was a giant ball of gas, and because of which doesn't have a surface.

Do you have a link to the article you linked to the picture.

Seems the thinking is now that it does have a solid core. But, this is based on computer modeling, so...make of it what you will.

www.universetoday.com...

Jupiter has a rocky core that is more than twice as large as previously thought, according to computer calculations by a geophysicist who simulated conditions inside the planet on the scale of individual hydrogen and helium atoms. "Our simulations show there is a big rocky object in the center surrounded by an ice layer and hardly any ice elsewhere in the planet," said Burkhard Militzer from University of California, Berkeley. "This is a very different result for the interior structure of Jupiter than other recent models, which predict a relatively small or hardly any core and a mixture of ices throughout the atmosphere." A comparison of this model with the planet's known mass, radius, surface temperature, gravity and equatorial bulge implies that Jupiter's core is an Earth-like rock 14 to 18 times the mass of Earth, or about one-twentieth of Jupiter's total mass, Militzer said. Previous models predicted a much smaller core of only 7 Earth masses, or no core at all.

reply to post by lpowell0627


if it makes you feel better we probably know about less than 0.000001% of the large rocks flying about in the area between us and pluto, thats before you consider the impossibly high number of possible rocks in space which are totally undetectable to us which could pass into 'this' space at any time having come from any number of likely sources.

We might if we're lucky have some limited knowledge of the paths and relative sizes of about 1% of the rocks between here and mars, of those that may cross orbits with the earth we probaly know about a slightly larger % but i wouldn't even hazard a guess as to what.

However we do know that statistically you are more than a trillion times more likely to live your entire life cycle as a human without being affected by a large falling space rock than you are to be alive when the earth is hit hard enough to affect you. If we were to express the likelyhood you as a lifeform being affected (800 million years or so with constantly increadsing numbers of life forms on the planet) then i would have to hold down some keys untill it made that annoying beeping sound.

It would be good if we could protect ourselves from giant falling space rocks of course, however far more pressing issues include war, hunger and domestic violence.

As a human your statistical chance of doom from hunger is probably someything like 1:3, probably a dozern times more likely than by war - out of the all the people ever on the planet maybe a 1/3 died for want of good food, 1/3 violent deaths eather by beast or man the rest were took mostly by illness, accident or age - only i would guess the smallest smallest fraction were ever killed by falling space rock.

Of course today it's almost certainly illness and accident which ends the most lives, thus the billions of dollars which would be needed to scan the skys in a paranoid search for doom could be much better spent on air ambulances, medical research, industrial agriculture and modern democratic reform - hopefully hunger, war and illness will be a thing of the past and a healthy, happy and rich society will have already made the big step into space and protecting earth from impact will come as second nature to our type two civ.

pretty cool, however i think its gonna be a while before we have an event as detailed as the shoemaker one.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/5f7f77440619.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by NatureBoy


Very good points, well stated NatureBoy. The ne ar-Earth objects (NEOs) tracked by NASA are those with a predictable orbit, and there are a myriad of others even smaller that are tracked by the JPL program, again with predictable orbits.

THEN....... the perhaps billions of objects that either aren't known, tracked, or are in orbits that could be impacted by other objects and sent toward the inner planets, such as those hypothesized in the Oort Cloud.

Put it all together and what do you [perhaps] get?* I statistical probability of the Earth, as well as most of the inner planets, being hit at some point.

We can study the potential effects of these objects with the Earth Impact Effects Program, and others.

Seems like little objects "sneak" up on us from time to time. I wonder if we have the technology to do much about large, known objects.





*bibbity bobbity boo? EEK!

Originally posted by star in a jar
Since Jupiter is a gas giant, where did the asteroid go, did it exit on the other side, break up, or did Jupiter absorb it like a sponge?

Both happen. Depending on the speed of impact, the composition of Jupiter's atmosphere, and the composition of the asteroid, it will slam into the gas giant and disintegrate itself. Debris from the impact might even be energetic enough to escape Jupiter's gravitational pull, being flung off into other parts of the solar system.

But most likely, it will just collide with a big kinetic boom, and Jupiter will become imperceptibly more massive.

This is also featured on spaceweather.com front page so i would say it is confirmed

Did something just hit Jupiter? On July 19th, a black "scar" appeared in Jupiter's clouds similar to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts of 1994. Veteran Jupiter observer Anthony Wesley photographed the feature from his observatory in Murrumbateman, Australia:

reply to post by paradiselost333


Thanks for posting this pic/link, I cannot get the one the OP had up to work. Very interesting, it is always hard to imagine the sheer size of these impacts, it looks so small in this perspective! Earth is certainly lucky, this is the second impact of this type to Jupiter in my lifetime, and thank our lucky stars (pardon the pun) earth has not been hit!

[edit on 19-7-2009 by space cadet]

Originally posted by lpowell0627
Perhaps my comment isn't as simple as I'm making it, so someone please feel free to tell me what I'm missing.

Jupiter isn't all that far away and is part of what i call the "monitored" planets -- meaning we have someone taking pictures of it all the time.

My question is: how the heck could they have not seen this asteroid approaching Jupiter long before it hit? I mean, they have lists and lists of asteroids and meteors that are "in Earth's path" that go from a potential collision a couple of years aways out to 150+ years away.

This makes me question how possible it really is for an undetected asteroid/meteor to strike Earth without all these experts seeing it coming before it's too late.

I'm not saying one is going to hit anytime soon, but I guess i'm a little disappointed that they don't have things as covered "up there" as I had thought.

I believe we just had a near miss around winter time(correct me if im wrong). We didnt hear about it until it had already passed by...

reply to post by paradiselost333


I have no doubt this will be confirmed but it being mentioned on spaceweather.com is not independent verification - its the Australian obervers picture on their site!

Still awaiting an image from someone else.

Has anyone seen any more yet?

Ive always doubted Jupiter being only gas...there has to be a core in there somewhere...how else can a ball of gas have such a strong gravitational pull....you would need a decent amount of rotating mass....

like they say, Jupiter sucks in the asteroids that were destined for earth ....

our protector is some respect.

Boy that is one big hole.If that hit earth you could say good bye to next chrismas dinner.

reply to post by NatureBoy


Thanks for your reply - it was well thought out and very informative.

I wasn't really concerned about getting struck by a wayward meteor or anything. I figure if one's coming - someone somewhere will see it ahead of time even if it is too late. I'm fairly certain it would spread like wildfire on the Internet.

I guess I thought that for the billions upon billions of dollars that NASA spends each year on monitoring things such as this, we'd have a better return on our investment than 1%. Of course, it is a division of the government, so I should have known better....