Jupiter It’s a cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Because of its circumference (the gas giant has the mass of 318 Earths), Jupiter can attract many objects into its orbit (although it can throw some into its orbit). earth neighborhood, also). Astronomers have discovered asteroids or comets large and small have impacted Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere in recent years, including an object a few dozen meters wide that exploded in the gas giant’s clouds just in August of this year.
Now it has happened again.
On November 15, a Japanese amateur astronomer detected a short-lived flash at Jupiter, a telltale sign of an impact.
“There was another impact on Jupiter last night!” planetary astronomer Heidi B. Hammel posted on X, the social media site formerly called Twitter, on November 16. “The bright flash is a bolide, a shooting star in the atmosphere” of Jupiter. “Too small to abandon a place of impact like we saw in 1994 and 2009.”
Hammel refers to impacts from much larger objects, such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet in 1994. It left dark spots on the Jovian surface, including a diameter of Land. This space rock came too close to Jupiter and was torn apart by intense Jovian gravity, creating fragments up to half a mile wide.
The much smaller recent impact can be seen below. The object (whether pieces of a kite or perhaps an asteroid, slammed into molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere, rapidly causing friction and heating. Then it explodes.
“It’s pretty much a fireball.”
“It’s pretty much a fireball,” Peter Vereš, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a collaborative research group between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard University Observatory, told Mashable in August, describing a similar Jovian impact event.
The tweet may have been deleted.
The tweet may have been deleted.
Collisions are a normal part of our Solar systemand space generally. Why did objects collide and clump together billions of years ago? formed planets.
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Objects collide with the EarthAlso, although on a smaller scale. Every day, about 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles fall through Earth’s atmosphere and quickly burn up. Every year, on average, a “car-sized asteroid” falls through our sky and explodes, explains NASA. Impacts from objects around 460 feet in diameter occur every 10,000 to 20,000 years, and a Impact of “killing dinosaurs” of a rock perhaps half a mile in diameter or more occurs on time scales of 100 million years.
But in the future, when a colossal rock returns, scientists hope to divert it.
