Impact On Jupiter Observed By Amateur Astronomers 53
Omomyid and other readers send in the news that the bright flash of an impact on Jupiter has been observed — and caught on film — by amateur astronomers. That WMV is from amateur Christopher Go. Here's Anthony Wesley's video (45 MB AVI; the site is already overloaded). In the larger video you can see the impact lasting for a couple of seconds, and a good deal of structure is visible. The amateurs report that no dark debris field developed around the impact site in the time before it rotated out of sight; this may indicate that the impactor burned up high in Jupiter's atmosphere. Soon professional astronomers, and possibly Hubble, will be on the job.
wtf AGAIN (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasn't there a similar impact last year observed around this time as well? /offtopic Coincidentally, I posted about this on my site this morning
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by the same guy as well! he must have a telescope pointed at jupiter at all times.
Re:wtf AGAIN (Score:5, Funny)
Could be worse, he could be observing Uranus.
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That joke never gets old - ever.
Fixed
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In polite company, it's referred to as Georgium Sidus.
That was some good chili but I'm going to be paying for it once it hits my Georgium Sidus.
Re:wtf AGAIN (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, which was also first observed by same amateur astronmer (Anthony Wesley). Here was his post of the recent impact on CloudyNights [cloudynights.com]
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Yes, which was also first observed by same amateur astronmer (Anthony Wesley).
Considering the extreme gravity of Jupiter, if the object that was crushed by Jupiter's gravity was named after its discoverer, would Jupiter be an Anthony Wesley Crusher?
Re:wtf AGAIN (Score:5, Informative)
There's no "wtf AGAIN" about this at all. Jupiter is the vacuum cleaner (no pun intended) of the solar system, and any object with a highly elliptic orbit will run a great risk of a Jovian ending.
This is what allows us to not be wiped out by crashing comets and meteorites every few years.
But, it's always good to see a public servant do its job.
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Depends on publicity. If TMZ sends paparazzi, then it's a star.
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It won't. A gas giant is a star that never happened. There' no do-over whereby a gas giant might become a star subsequently.
The mass difference between Jupiter and even the smallest star is still huge -- like, 50+ times what it currently weighs. I don't believe what you ask is possible.
Well, it's 2010... it's possible (Score:2)
Re:wtf AGAIN (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't. A gas giant is a star that never happened. There' no do-over whereby a gas giant might become a star subsequently.
Not for Jupiter, but it likely happens all the time in the rest of the galaxy.
From what I remember, fusion occurs somewhere from 15-75 Jupiter-Masses (Mj). If you had a gas giant with 95% of that mass it could consume the remainder necessary for its gravity to become strong enough to start a continuous fusion reaction. Fusion likely does occur with smaller objects, but not on stellar scales/timelines and likely with deuterium instead of just Hydrogen (which fuses more near the 75 Mj mark).
Interestingly, a star that is just large enough to begin fusing hydrogen will look smaller than Jupiter due to the increased gravity pulling all the gas in.
The mechanic should occur, since it is the same mechanic we observe for a type of supernova in which a near-supernova capable sized white-dwarf pulls matter from a smaller partner in a binary system.
I wouldn't be surprised if you had near-brown dwarf sized gas giants tripping the limit by pulling in extra matter (even other gas giants)
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Sorry, yes. I should have qualified and said that Jupiter never would, at least not in any meaningful timeline in relation to us.
But, Jupiter would need to accumulate immense amounts of mass to get to that stage. As you say, 15-75x it's current mass, which is an utterly huge amount of stuff.
The mind reels.
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The mind reels.
The emptyness of space never really got to me. What really baked my noodle was looking at a series of stars appear on my screen from a brown dwarf, past our star, and upwards to red giants like Betelgeuse.
Then I saw stars that made Betelgeuse look like Mercury compared to our Sun and I felt like I fell through the floor.
And when you look at this image: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/compare_star_sizes.gif [uoregon.edu] and realize that that large red one next the Sun is Betelgeuse, you will get an i
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It don't feel 'insignificant' in the face of it in the way most people use that term. Not in the crushing sense of 'what now', but more of a realization of just how unlikely one's own existence seems; and therefore all the more cool.
The sheer 'bigness' o
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However, as soon as you start to assign numbers to this kind of stuff, the brain just sort of stops trying and you occasionally find yourself just kind of going "wow".
Ahh here is the picture I was looking for:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Star-sizes.jpg [wikimedia.org]
When you wrap your mind about the significance of the transition from frame 4 to 5 is when I really get that 'wow' feeling.
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Ow ow ow ow ow. I think I have a brain cramp. :-P
I'd like to see a scale to help me absorb that, but, yes, wow.
Betelgeuse is several orders of magnitude bigger than something which is several orders of magnitude bigger than our sun is about as close as I can get to grokking that picture.
Thanks for the pic (and the headache ;-)
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Err, bit of an error in my previous post. Not Betelgeuse (which IS pretty friggen big) looking like Mercury, but still pretty damned big.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris [wikipedia.org]
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Dood! You're made out of star dust that has organized itself to form eyes and have time to look up at the sky.
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Actually Betelgeuse is one of the largest known stars. The very largest known star [wikipedia.org] is only about xx the size of Betelgeuse. So not quite the difference between Mercury and the Sun.
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Brown dwarfs territory starts at dozen or so Jupiter masses, at which point they do start fusing deuterium as you mention; and have quite different dynamics, fully convective interiors.
But once fusing of hydrogen starts, the star is likely to expand considerably.
Anyway, I wouldn't expect accretion of mass to be all that likely - simply because such giant planets / sub brown dwarfs would be probably the biggest, by far, "planetary" body in the system already; there would be nowhere to get any significant mas
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As others have said, it won't, it's nowhere near massive enough.
But to put it in to some perspective, current estimates for the mass breakdown of the solar system put around 99% of the mass in the sun. That is, the sun isn't 100x more massive than Jupiter, but than *everything else put together* - all the planets, asteroids, comets, everything.
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Actually it's not that simple.
Without Jupiter acting as a “cosmic vacuum cleaner” sucking up these dangerous objects, there would be so many catastrophic impacts that life probably wouldn’t have evolved on the Earth and we wouldn’t be here today. At least, this is the commonly accepted wisdom. Like so many topics in astrobiology, it isn’t as straightforward as it first seems.
http://euro.astrobio.net/exclusive/2521/rethinking-jupiter [astrobio.net]
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Interesting. I've also heard a theory that Jupiter is responsible for disturbing Oort Cloud objects and drawing them into orbits that go through the inner solar system, so the increase in dangerous objects would roughly cancel the objects deflected or absorbed by Jupiter.
I think that theory still considers comets and other non-near-earth objects to be the primary threat, though.
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No...if we were, they would be RealVideo or even Vivo Video(!!!)
Pictures! (Score:3, Interesting)
From summary:
— and caught on film —
This is the important part. Like the rest of us, astronomers follow the little known meme Pictures or it didn't happen!
Chris Go is a Machine (Score:3, Informative)
Chris Go [cstoneind.com] is probably the world's premier amateur observer of Jupiter. He also discovered the change of Oval BA to a red color similar to the Great Red Spot.
He lives in Cebu City, Philippines where he has excellent "seeing" most nights. "Seeing" is the term for how steady the atmosphere appears to be and is critical for getting good images of the planets.
K'breel addresses the council of elders (Score:2)
K'Breel, our most benevolent and enlightened speaker from the Council of Elders:
"Citizens. It is with my deepest regret that I report the transport of gelsacs destined for the orb of bands has unfortunately met with disaster. The pilot of the escape pod was reportedly texting shortly before impact."
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Partly, because the verb "to film" carried over into non-film formats -- using a video camera was still called "filming" even if it wasn't technically accurate. Some people still talk about 'taping' shows on their PVR too -- I do, and I'm supposed to know better.
Language doesn't always change as fast as technology, and it would drive everyone batty to have to adjust their speech every time someone creates new technology. Especially because the technology changes so damne
YouTube link... (Score:5, Informative)
on Earth (Score:1)
It would be interesting to observe a similar impact on Earth.
LOOP! (Score:4, Informative)
I am not an astronomer, but it looks like (Score:2, Insightful)
Enough with the "Jupiter Impacts" already... (Score:2, Funny)
I'm no expert (Score:1)
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Multiple impact sites at the same time on Jupiter? That's impossible!
(Or, maybe you should google "Shoemaker-Levy 9")
Selecting the footage (Score:1)
Does anyone know if/what software is used to isolate the "relevant" footage? If you just plug in a camera in place of the telescope's ocular and let it record to the 'puter, you'll have to spend literally thousands of hours of recording (and that's being generous) before actually picking up something interesting/unusual.