Jupiter crashed into something big

Photo: John McKeon

On the seventeenth of March, amateur astronomers from Austria and Ireland captured on video the time when a large, unidentified object, presumably a comet or an asteroid, collided with Jupiter. On the record, it looks just like a small flash, but if we take into account the size and attraction of Jupiter, then in our understanding something really catastrophic happened.

Collisions of cosmic bodies with Jupiter are not a rare phenomenon: the gas giant attracts / intersects with “someone solid” about once a year, but almost never succeeds in capturing the moment of collision.


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So far, neither amateur nor professional astronomers have any details of what happened. However, this record is a characteristic indicator of how far amateur optics has progressed and what it is capable of when interacting with astronomers from different corners of the earth among themselves. It is possible that at that moment someone else was watching Jupiter, and the data obtained by that person could shed more light on the collision that occurred.

Via engadget