September 10, 2012 Jupiter Impact Options

[Hungry4info]

I couldn't find the thread that discusses previous impacts, otherwise I would have posted it there.

New impact sighted on Jupiter.
http://www.universetoday.com/97294/viewing...-by-a-fireball/

Confirmation:
http://georgeastro.weebly.com/jupiter.html

[Paolo]

interesting news. I am wondering: are we seeing an observational bias since all impacts so far have been observed during summer and around Jupiter opposition? in this case, impacts must be even more frequent.

[dvandorn]

Gee, it appears that Jupiter is still in the process of clearing its neighborhood of other solar-orbital objects. Per the new definitions, it looks like it doesn't qualify as a planet.

-the other Doug

[centsworth_II]

Gee, it appears that Jupiter is still in the process of clearing its neighborhood...

I don't think the object that hit Jupiter was in the neighborhood for very long!

[Mongo]

Watch Live: Searching for Scars of a Giant Explosion on Jupiter

Watch as the Slooh Space Camera collaboration searches for scars from an enormous explosion in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere during a live show starting at 7 p.m. Pacific/10 p.m. Eastern.



On the morning of Sept. 10, a gigantic flare brightened Jupiter’s cloudtops. The white flash lasted approximately two seconds, according to amateur astronomer Dan Peterson Racine, who first spotted it. Subsequent amateur astronomers confirmed the finding, including George Hall, who captured video of the explosion (above).

The gargantuan blast was most likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting Jupiter, much like the bright flashes famously created by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 or more recent impacts from a couple years ago. Tonight’s Slooh show will search for the impact area as Jupiter rotates and brings it into view.

edit -- oops, I did not see the other thread on this impact event.
Topics merged / moderator

[Mongo]

Another Impact on Jupiter?

Two amateur videos shot early on March 17th show a brief but bright flash on the edge of Jupiter's disk. Did the King of Planets get whacked again?

Right now amateur and professional planet watchers around the world are trying to pin down the specifics of an apparent impact on Jupiter back on March 17th. Only within the past few days have two videos emerged showing a brief flash of light right on the edge of Jupiter's disk, near the boundary of the planet's bright Equatorial Zone and its tawny North Equatorial Belt.

Gerrit Kernbauer of Mödling, Austria, posted the first video of the event. "I was observing and filming Jupiter with my Skywatcher Newton 200/1000 Telescope [an 8-inch f/5 reflector]," he recalls. "The seeing was not the best, so I hesitated to process the videos. Nevertheless, 10 days later I looked through the videos and I found this strange light spot that appeared for less than one second on the edge of the planetary disc."

Two days later, Irish observer John McKeon posted his own record of the flash. McKeon was using an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and ASI120MM camera in Swords, a Dublin suburb. Crucially, he also used a near-infrared filter to reduce the planet's brightness. He was making a 3½-hour-long time-lapse video of Jupiter and its moons, "with a happy coincidence of the impact in the second-to-last capture of the night."

Now planetary imaging specialist Marc Delcroix has obtained the raw videos, processed them to bring out extra detail, and refined the characteristics of the flash. He finds that the brightening lasted just over 1 second. But the timing is off a bit: in Kernbauer's video the flash began at 00:18:35 UT, whereas in McKeon's the onset is 9 seconds later.

Despite the time mismatch, the event appears to be real. Apparently the impacting object, be it an asteroid or comet, was rather small. "Nobody sees any debris field associated with that part of the atmosphere," notes Glenn Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Apparently mission managers decided against slewing the Hubble Space Telescope around to take a quick look.

But March 17th's impact, if the evidence for it holds up, becomes the fifth such event in the past decade. The largest of these occurred July 19, 2009, and it left a distinctly dark "powder burn" in Jupiter's upper atmosphere first spotted by Australian astro-imager Anthony Wesley.

That was followed by three lesser strikes on June 3, 2010 (recorded independently by Wesley and Christopher Go); on August 10, 2010 (independently seen by Masayuki Tachikawa and Kazuo Aoki); and on September 10, 2012 (seen visually by Dan Petersen and independently recorded by George Hall).

Counting the historic multiple-hit crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994, that's a grand total of six impacts on Jupiter in the past 22 years.

At first, there was some speculation that the March 17th flash was somehow linked to Jupiter's close-in moon Amalthea, which was positioned close to where the flash occurred. But that notion has since been ruled out.

For one thing, Delcroix's analysis puts the flash location at a latitude of +12.4°, well north of where Amalthea would have been (and clearly within the NEB). Moreover, "The flash was very like previous impacts into the atmosphere of Jupiter," notes John Rogers, who head the Jupiter observing section of the British Astronomical Association, "and as Jupiter is a much bigger target than Amalthea, it is much more likely to have been on Jupiter."

[JRehling]

I've been imaging Jupiter about 4x per week lately, and this news momentarily gave me hopes of finding it in my data, but no chance: Only someone on that side of the world would have been imaging at that time.

It reminds me, again, that an interesting project would be to coordinate "amateur" observers to produce a nearly continuous real-time record of Jupiter. The data is surely out there, or could be. The cost would be extremely small compared to a mission involving a rocket launch. I would imagine this sort of organization will become reality sooner or later.

[Gerald]

Jupiter is indeed of particular interest, at the moment, in order to support the Juno project. This includes organizing observations by amateurs and professionals.
These intensified observations increase the likelihood to discover impact events.