Amateur Astronomer Spots Possible New Impact Flash At Jupiter

RockDoctor writes: A recent flurry of posts to astronomy news sites points to an amateur astronomer spotting a new impact on Jupiter. Every such case documented improves our estimates of how many bodies are flying around in the (inner) solar system, and improves our estimates of how likely we are to get another hit in a year, a decade, or a century. Sky and Telescope has been pulling in more information. SpaceWeather.com has an image of the impact. (Note: some of these images have been "flipped" to an "on sky" orientation, and others haven't because astronomical telescopes generally produce an inverted image since it requires fewer reflections.) Estimates of the impactor size are unclear, but minimum sizes seem to be in the several kg range. Depending on how long the flash lasted, it could go up into the tons, which is important for estimating the number of potentially hazardous objects in the inner solar system. Space and Telescope's correspondents put the size at "up to" (important words!) the 30m range (100ft in Tudor measure), which would be around 10,000 tons -- a Chelyabinsk 2013-size body.

neat stuff but

[iggymanz]

neat stuff but a 30-some meter asteroid isn't that big a deal even if it hits earth. happens quite often, mostly annoying than dangerous.

Re:neat stuff but

[Sique]

The Chelyabinsk meteor [wikipedia.org] begs to differ. Though it exploded 30 km up in the sky, and none of the remains dropped somewhere close to any settlement, it still got 1500 persons wounded and 100 persons hospitalized.

Re:neat stuff but

[Megane]

Reminder: if you see a big flash of light outside, don't stand in front of a glass window to see what it was.

Also, if you're at the beach and suddenly all the water drains away, don't wander out to gawk at the fish flopping on the wet sand, run for the hills.

Re:

[Sique]

Yes, and the Chelyabinsk meteorite wasn't even that large (about a quarter of the mass of the one at Jupiter).

Still, it was the largest recorded impact of a meteor on Earth since the Tunguska event [wikipedia.org] in 1908. To call such impacts "not that big of a deal, happens quite often" is somewhat euphemistic.

Re:

[iggymanz]

Not euphemistic at all, every 60 years we get 20m range, every 187 30m range. That's frequent for timespan of human race or recorded history. Mostly annoying too, since most would disturb uninhabited areas, true now as then.

So a hundred people got hurt, and 2 seriously for our rock in Chelyabinsk... and all by glass but for 20 that got a kind of "sunburn" from the ultraviolet of hot thing. *yawn* We have more people killed and maimed by thunderstorms each year, shit your pants over that, rock precipitat

Re:

[RockDoctor]

The size constraints for the recent impactor are very weak. Really, we need more consistent monitoring for such impacts to try to constrain the mass-frequency curve for the relevant portion of the Solar system - our neighbourhood!

Re: neat stuff but

[sabbede]

And if you see rats crawling out of the sewers to die in the street, get out of the city as fast as you can and stock up on antibiotics.

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[quenda]

Reminder: if you see a big flash of light outside, don't stand in front of a glass window to see what it was.

Yep. That's how so many people in Beirut were killed and injured.
People ignorantly laugh at those old Cold War "duck under the desk" movie reels, but far more people would be hit by flying glass, than falling rubble or dangerous radiation.

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[iggymanz]

wrong, that proves my point, was practically nothing. Get some perspective, all injuries by glass and most of those from rubbernecking through window like a dumb-ass at explosion when the blast took seconds to arrive. Don't rubberneck out window when there is explosion, m'kay?

    kids these days, "Ooooo, a bunch of people got boo-boo's, it was carnage!" Pffft.

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[Too Late for Cool ID]

neat stuff but a 30-some meter asteroid isn't that big a deal even if it hits earth. happens quite often, mostly annoying than dangerous.

How big a deal it is depends on where you're standing

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[iggymanz]

nah, my being one of a 120 in city of 3.5 million having injuries isn't big deal. No one died, all recovered. We have thunderstorms with worse outcomes.

Re:

[iggymanz]

Not unrelated at all, I mention things that come from sky that maim and kill. Water, wind and plasma bolts are big concern on this Earth, rocks from sky are no big deal. See?, same category. My deal is hand wringing wimps getting all worked up over 30m range asteroids when they are mostly annoying and basically not a threat. the next one that hits Earth will probably hit in unpopulated area like all the last ten and a half thousand of them did since the dawn of modern humans.

I love the stats and data, t

Re:

[RockDoctor]

The body-mass vs frequency curve isn't well known between the 1km range (about a million kilotonnes) and the dust (zodiacal light) range. Since there is a considerable difference between the effects of a million kilotonne object and a mere kilotonne object (a Chelyabinsk to Tunguska object), then getting a better handle on that part of the "mass function". We are still in the range of very small numbers of such impactors.

You know those people who have no experience at all in estimating threats - the US mil

Kilograms?!

[KT0100101101010100]

Kilograms surely wouldn't be enough to create a flash the size of a continent, unless travelling at relativistic speeds?!!

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[hackertourist]

TFS says 10 kilotons.

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[RockDoctor]

First estimates were made before the video had been made available, and were on the basis that the requisite number (a few hundred) photons appeared in one frame. That gives a minimum mass in the kilograms. When the videos became available and the flash was seen in 6 (maybe 7) frames (and the interframe gaps) the number of photons could be estimated better, and the size estimates moved up into the tonnes to kilotonnes range.

Earth sized

[Malifescent]

I can still remember the Jupiter impact in the late '90's where the fireball turned out the size of the entire Earth!!!

Re:

[RockDoctor]

So can the astronomers of the world, and specifically those granted funds by the fiat of the US President (and other comparable funding streams from elsewhere in the world). That's largely why these events attract attention, even if the actual data collection is largely done by amateurs wanting bragging rights.

There is a funding stream for observing the full Moon (when there is too much sky glow for many telescopes to be much use as "light buckets") to look for comparable flashes. The data points are still

Slow news day in the solar system....

[keithdowsett]

OK, it's nice that someone managed to record an impact with Jupiter, but it's not really big news. Jupiter has been hoovering up space debris for millions of years.

The main reason we have so few meteor impacts on the inner planets is Jupiter's huge gravitation field. This greatly restricts the number of stable orbits which can be occupied by objects. The majority of possible orbits end up either in Jupiter or the Sun within a few million years. Even relatively stable comets like Shoemaker-Levy only need a s

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Orbital velocities around Jupiter are likely to be quite large, tens of kilometers per second (based on an escape velocity of 60km/second)

For those who don't recognise this trick, the logic is this : the escape speed (strictly not a velocity) represents the energy needed to take a test particle from the body surface to an arbitrarily large distance form the body. Therefore, a test particle falling from (arbitrarily large) to the surface will arrive at the escape speed. Hence, the escape speed is a reasonabl

CHINA

[AndyKron]

This could be CHINA testing a new weapon! . Space Force where are you???

Pretty big

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Interesting. It looks about the size of a continent on Earth, so how much of the flash is the lighting of the clouds, and how much is a bright light washing out a larger area in the camera?

I would guess much larger than a few kg, as this is on the order of those broken up asteroids from a decade or two ago

And if we want to start getting a feeling for numbers and size of impacts, to judge short and medium term risk, perhaps start a cheap program to track all such heavenly bodies for impact continuously.

Tudor measure?

[sabbede]

Iâ(TM)ve never heard that one before. Imperial, US, Avoirdupois (for weight), but never Tudor. But then there is no such thing, which is probably why. The Tudor-era system of measurement was called the Winchester.

Re:

[Mister Transistor]

Yeah, I was hoping for an even more obscure system, like Hogsheads per Hectare or something like that!

Re:

[RockDoctor]

The last definition I remember for a foot (well, the yard) before the metric system was introduced was something like the distance from one member of Henry the Syphilitic Tudor to one of his other members. All members being, of course, similarly syphilitic.

Wierd

[PPH]

Because Shoemaker-Levy made dark spots when it hit Jupiter.

http://forcetoknow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Jupiter-Shoemaker-Levy-9-impact_-forcetoknow.com_.jpg [forcetoknow.com]

Re:

[cusco]

It first made a flash, but because of the relative positions of Earth and Jupiter it was just over the horizon from our point of view. IIRC Hubble was able to image just the tops of the larger impacts. We saw the dark spots after planetary rotation brought the impact sites into our view.

incoming...or outgoing?

[argStyopa]

I see a only a flash on the picture.
Of course that could be an impact... or a launch.

Honestly, if there's an advanced Jovian civilization that has to sit less than a light hour away and constantly listen to our chattering bullshit, I'd eventually get fed up too.

Impact?

[ayesnymous]

If something is fully gas, can something else really "impact" it?