Jupiter experienced a collision earlier this month with something big — possibly an asteroid or comet — that slammed into the planet in an incident caught on video by amateur astronomers.
Paul Chodas, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Studies at its
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Space.com that it's not clear what exactly hit Jupiter on March 17, but he believes it was probably an asteroid.
"It's more likely to be an asteroid simply because there are more of them," he said. "From our point of view, this simply serves to remind us that impacts in the solar system are real and Jupiter gets more than its fair share of impacts."
"It draws in a lot of asteroids and comets. We are seeing these impact flashes on Jupiter about once a year now, and that's I believe because of instrumentation," Chodas added.
From Swords, Ireland, John McKeon watched the collision on his telescope while capturing time-lapse video of the transit of Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede, according to Space.com.
According to Tech Crunch, Gerrit Kernbauer saw the same collision using his 20-centimeter telescope from Mödling, Austria. Kernbauer said he did not notice the collision until 10 days later when he was reviewing the footage.
Phil Plait, who writes Slate's Bad Astronomy blog, said that because of Jupiter's great gravitational pull, the collision likely packed quite a punch.
"On average (and ignoring orbital velocity), an object will hit Jupiter with roughly five times the velocity it hits Earth, so the impact energy is 25 times as high," Plait wrote. "The asteroid that burned up over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 was 19 meters across, and it exploded with the energy of 500,000 tons of TNT."
"Now multiply that by 25, and you can see how it doesn't take all that big a rock to hit Jupiter for us to be able to see it from Earth," he added.
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