Two amateur astronomers have managed to capture images of the moment Jupiter's surface was struck by a comet or asteroid.
The videos, captured simultaneously in Austria and Ireland, show the bright glow of an impact on the surface of the gas giant. Though it hasn't been confirmed what the object was, it is likely to be an asteroid or comet, with astronomer Phil Plait writing at Slate that the object was likely to be "a small asteroid or comet...probably in the tens-of-meters wide range".
Rocks and debris generally hit the much-more massive Jupiter with around 25 times as much energy than on Earth, at at around five times the velocity, Plait points out. The impact of even a small rock, such as that which hit Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring around 1,000 people in 2013, would potentially be visible from Earth if it struck Jupiter.
Gerrit Kernbauer, the Austrian astronomer, wrote that he was "observing and filming Jupiter with my Skywatcher Newton 200/1000 telescope" when he saw the impact.
"The quality was not the best, so I hesitated to process the videos," he writes on YouTube. "Nevertheless, 10 days later I looked through the videos and found this straight light spot that appeared for less than one second on the edge of the planetary disc."
Because of the relatively small size of the comet, major space agencies and observatories are unlikely to investigate the impact, though Kernbauer compares the occurence to that of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet that broke apart and collided with Jupiter in 1994 -- the very first direct observation of a collision with a planet. "Thinking back to Shoemaker-Levy 9, my only explanation for this is an asteroid or comet that entered Jupiter's high atmosphere and burned up/exploded very fast," he writes.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
