Jun 032010
Via blog reader Mike Holt:
http://www.cosmicdiary.org/blogs/nasa/franck_marchis/?p=766
Last year on July 2009, I announced that an amateur astronomer from Australia, Anthony Wesley, detected a bruise on Jupiter probably due to an impact from an asteroid that we followed up collecting images at Keck and with HST. Today another impact event may have happened again.
Almost exactly 3 hours ago, at 20:30 UT, Anthony announced on IceInSpace that he may have captured another impact event, seen as “a large fireball on Jupiter, it lasted a couple of seconds and was very bright.”
The more we watch for this sort of thing, the more we see of this sort of thing.
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Video of the impact here: http://astro.christone.net/jupiter/jupiterimpact.wmv
…although to me it looks like it might be faked.
“The more we watch for this sort of thing, the more we see of this sort of thing.”
And the more poo it scares out of those of us paying attention.
Niven & Pournelle *are* working on a sequel to Lucifer’s Hammer….
8-|
But if you extrapolate the number of collisions we’ve seen in the past few years back though a billion years or so, you can see that Jupiter is one hell of a efficient vacuum cleaner for comets and asteroids, and a lot of the rogue objects that threatened the Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago aren’t around anymore thanks to it.
As time goes on, the danger of a major impact like the one that blew the crap out of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is constantly dropping thanks to Jupiter.