Jupiter recently welcomed a striking guest from space. NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Jupiter receives multiple impacts from across the solar system, and new footage shows one of the largest astronomers have ever seen.
About 14 seconds into the video below, you can see a bright flash appear in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. The flash came from an impact – most likely an asteroid or comet hitting the planet. The video was taken by amateur astronomer Tadao Ohsugi, in Japan, in August. This is a rare sight.
Fireballs can also occur on Earth. When meteoroids – small chunks of space rock – fall towards us, they sometimes penetrate the atmosphere at such high speed that they burn up in the air.
However, this fireball on Jupiter is much larger than anything that could safely hit Earth.
One of the brightest and largest Jupiter fireballs ever recorded
Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Kyoto University, confirmed to The New York Times that there were six reports of these flashes on August 28. He said that this was one of the brightest fireballs ever recorded on Jupiter, and only the second largest fireball captured on Jupiter. a decade.
The last impact of this magnitude, assessed by Arimatsu in 2021, had a force equivalent to about two megatons of TNT.
Previously, a giant impact in 2009 left a dark spot of debris on Jupiter’s surface, which stretched twice the length of the United States.
Dark purple spots on Jupiter show where an object collided with the planet in 2009. NASA, ESA, and H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado), and the Jupiter Impact Team
Previously, in 1994, comet fragments hit Jupiter in succession, creating a series of stunning bright flashes.
Arimatsu compared the fireball in the new video to the Tunguska event in 1908, when an asteroid exploded in the sky over Siberia. The resulting shock wave and heat blast destroyed 830 square miles of forest, according to NASA.
Even though the object that hit Jupiter was large, it was basically eaten and dissolved by the gas giant. When debris hits Jupiter, “it will melt and explode,” Peter Vereš, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable.
If this object were to hit Earth, there would be a disaster. But Jupiter may have saved our planet from countless impacts, both as big as Tunguska and as big as the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Jupiter is the ‘vacuum cleaner of the solar system’
As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter has strong gravity so far that it attracts comets and asteroids.
That’s why many scientists believe that Jupiter is an important ingredient in the recipe that makes Earth suitable for life. Especially in the early days of the solar system, when more and more space rocks were moving around, Jupiter’s gravity may have posed the greatest threat.
The new video is “a glimpse of violent processes that occurred in the early days of our solar system,” Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester, told the Times.
Even in the millennia since those early days, Jupiter may have saved our little ocean world from many space rocks like those that caused the destruction of the dinosaurs.
In fact, Jupiter’s appetite for asteroids and comets earned it the nickname “vacuum cleaner of the solar system,” according to NASA.
Arimatsu says impacts like this happen more often than we can observe, and the scientific community relies on hobby astronomers to make reports like this.
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2023-10-20 20:38:09
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