Possible comet/asteroid impact on Jupiter?

[portugal]

It should have been a big object.
When it was SL9 we got some points on it and saw the energy and the "damage" to the higher jupiter atmosfere.
That time we could saw the impactors moving towards the planet... this time nobody saw it.

So it could be a small object that blowup on the diving to the jupiter higher levels or a big object that was just atracted to jupiter directly by it´s gravity pull.

But the pictures are something that looks bigger than joining most parts of the SL9 diving through jupiter...

 

[MeteorWayne]

I think you are wrong. IIRC, many of the SL9 impact scars were much larger than this one.

And again, since we don't know the impact velocity, it's all speculation.

 

[97gooljo]

i wonder, though -- if review of recent jupiter images reveals no suspect object, might we still be able to infer something either about the impactor's size or composition?

it occurs to me that most comets, even if they are small, or fragmented as SL-9 or, say, comet west were, show SOME haziness or tail at jupiter's average distance from the sun. and most comets seem to consist primarily of water ice and other high albido materials.

so, if nothing at all shows up, would it be safe to assume that this was a small and / or dark asteroid? another thought -- might it be worth reviewing jupiter's known moons to see if one of them may have been a candidate for a decayed orbit?

 

[InterestedOne]

ok so here is a real stupid question but i just have to know, over millions of years of jupiter sucking in all these solid bodies and smashing them to dust, does the material swirl around in the atmosphere forever of the jupiters gravity pull it towards the core making the core bigger over eons?

 

[MeteorWayne]

Look folks. 99.9% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun. So pretty much everything orbits the sun. 75% of what is not the sun is Jupiter. It is large enough to eject objects from the inner solar sytem (such as the Oort cloud_) Jupiter is about 75% of everything that is not the sun. So it has effects on objects that come close, and orbits about 5 AU away(the earth orbits at 1 AU) some can can trapped into orbits that will impact Jupiter.

Jupiter doesn't suck anything in, it's a mere pebble in the solar system. If something comes close enough, it's orbit can be changed, such as the Juiter Faminly comets.

Jupiter's moons orbit the planet, if any of them were the source of the impactor, we would have known about it years ago.

 

[CalliArcale]

Well, I suppose they could take how the impact of the various sized pieces of SL-9 individually changed the cloud desk at their impact points, and extrapolate that information to get a "closer to" approximation for the size of this impactor. I'm sure many, many pictures were taken of that event to use as a kind of "Impactor size/cloud deck disturbance" scale.

Oh yes; the SL-9 impact was extremely well documented, and I'm sure they'll do exactly that. I just don't know how big the error bars will end up being. ;-) Though as MeteorWayne points out, since we don't know how fast the object is traveling, we do still have a very important variable which is completely unknown. Unless....

i wonder, though -- if review of recent jupiter images reveals no suspect object, might we still be able to infer something either about the impactor's size or composition?

They'll be able to make some guesses, and probably constrain the possibilities. But it is possible that someone might find the impactor by looking in old imagery. Sometimes asteroids are discovered in old imagery, or rediscovered in images taken several years before the object was actually discovered, and this can be very useful in deducing the object's orbit. If we're very lucky, someone might find this object in old data.

Btw, it was simply not possible to actually watch the impacts proper during Shoemaker-Levy. Each object impacted beyond one limb of the planet. What we DID see later was the spectacular glowing dome of light from the collision energies, when they re-appeared around the approaching limb; in one case, spectacularly so.

Actually.....

This image wasn't taken from Earth -- indeed, we could not see the impacts from Earth. This image was taken by the Galileo spacecraft, which was soon to enter orbit around Jupiter. This sequence shows the impact of fragment W. Oddly, Hubble seemed to spot this impact at the same time, despite it being out of range behind Jupiter; astronomers believe this indicates the plume was so large that it was visible from behind the planet's limb, exactly 15 years ago (July 22, 1994). (And indeed, as noted, the "exactly 15 years" thing is pure coincidence. Jupiter's year is considerably longer than Earth's.)

 

[MasterComposter]

This object was a Zerlobian warship coming into our system from interstallar space and attempting to shed off some veloicity in an aerobreaking manuever, skimming through the Jovian atmosphere. Fortunately for us, some alien engineer botched the conversion from Zerlobian units to metric.

 

[CalliArcale]

ok so here is a real stupid question but i just have to know, over millions of years of jupiter sucking in all these solid bodies and smashing them to dust, does the material swirl around in the atmosphere forever of the jupiters gravity pull it towards the core making the core bigger over eons?

First off, as MeteorWayne indicated, Jupiter doesn't have any special properties when it comes to capturing stuff. It's big, yeah, but it still really doesn't cover all that much space. More stuff *doesn't* get sucked in than *does*. (Indeed, Jupiter shoves away at least as much stuff as it drags along. Probably more. Probably a *lot* more.)

But stuff still hits it. Heck, stuff hits Earth all the time, and the Earth is constantly accruing mass as a result. The same happens to Jupiter. Various things hit it, cosmic dust falls onto it, etc, and this is added to its mass. I would guess that some of it stays in the atmosphere and some of it sinks, depending on density and weather conditions.

 

[BigTuna]

Spacecraft reentering our own atmosphere often do not even reach the ground

Wow, it's a wonder NASA can get anyone to sign up for astronaut school!

 

[brandbll]

This is why we need to get an orbiter back around Jupiter, we miss stuff like this. Imaghine how useful that would be right now. Sucks New Horizon wasn't just a tad behind schedule or it could have gotten us some pretty nice pictures.

 

[General_Kenobi]

Couldn't we, for the most part, infer that this impactor was NOT a comet? We already witnessed what a comet would do...break up in lieu of Jupiter's gravitation pull. As far as what we have witnessed, this is what we know...or at least what I know. A single impact point seems, to me anyway, to suggest this being a more solid object. I honeslty do not know, so I am asking. Are my assumptions along the correct path?

 

[yevaud]

Calli, that's pretty much what I saw, although in a different position on the approaching limb. And - Yahoo! - enough light using the 14 inch reflector, that we resolved color; it was a pale orange! Beautiful!

(Or perhaps I imagined the color. Always possible, I suppose...)

 

[97gooljo]

"Jupiter's moons orbit the planet, if any of them were the source of the impactor, we would have known about it years ago." MeteorWayne

S/2003 J 23 wasn't discovered until 2004 -- many more discovered in 2003.

I guess I should rephrase -- could we look at the positions of known GROUPS of small, asteroid-like Jovian moons (I'm talking about your local bulk cruisers, not your big Corellian jobs, now) and see if any of the groupings might have been candidates to supply a known (or unknown) satellite in a decaying orbit?

As for comets always breaking up -- I suppose there could also be the minute possibility of a head-on, non-orbiting comet collision. That seems highly improbable, statistically speaking.

All in all -- this is some pretty exciting space news!

Can we nominate Jupiter for Secretary of the Department of Home Planet Security? Keeping the Inner Solar System safe from celestial terrorists since 6,000,000,000 BC!

 

[MeteorWayne]

This is why we need to get an orbiter back around Jupiter, we miss stuff like this. Imaghine how useful that would be right now. Sucks New Horizon wasn't just a tad behind schedule or it could have gotten us some pretty nice pictures.

The sad but realistic fact is that there will be no multibillion dollar missions to Jupiter (like Galileo) or Saturn (like Cassini) or to Uranus or Neptune that will arrive in our lifetime.

Whatever we can learn will be from reanalyzing the data we already have. There will be no more.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Couldn't we, for the most part, infer that this impactor was NOT a comet? We already witnessed what a comet would do...break up in lieu of Jupiter's gravitation pull. As far as what we have witnessed, this is what we know...or at least what I know. A single impact point seems, to me anyway, to suggest this being a more solid object. I honeslty do not know, so I am asking. Are my assumptions along the correct path?

No not really. A comet and an asteroid are the same thing at Jupiter's distance 90% of the time. As I've said many times, there is a continuum of objects from all rock to all ice, and everywhere in between. S-L9 was different in that it was ripped apart by a close approach to Jupiter, so the ices were more exposed than ususal. If that had not occurred, it would have looked just like an asteroid when it impacted.

 

[MeteorWayne]

"Jupiter's moons orbit the planet, if any of them were the source of the impactor, we would have known about it years ago." MeteorWayne

S/2003 J 23 wasn't discovered until 2004 -- many more discovered in 2003.

I guess I should rephrase -- could we look at the positions of known GROUPS of small, asteroid-like Jovian moons (I'm talking about your local bulk cruisers, not your big Corellian jobs, now) and see if any of the groupings might have been candidates to supply a known (or unknown) satellite in a decaying orbit?

As for comets always breaking up -- I suppose there could also be the minute possibility of a head-on, non-orbiting comet collision. That seems highly improbable, statistically speaking.

All in all -- this is some pretty exciting space news!

Can we nominate Jupiter for Secretary of the Department of Home Planet Security? Keeping the Inner Solar System safe from celestial terrorists since 6,000,000,000 BC!

Sure we could, but all of the known moos are orbiting Jupiter in orbits that will not intersect the planet.

It had to come from outside the Jupiter moon system.

 

[CalliArcale]

Calli, that's pretty much what I saw, although in a different position on the approaching limb. And - Yahoo! - enough light using the 14 inch reflector, that we resolved color; it was a pale orange! Beautiful!

(Or perhaps I imagined the color. Always possible, I suppose...)

*drools*

I am now massively jealous of you.

I did get to see the dark "scars" afterwards, through my dad's 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain. Definitely left an impression on my mind. (Pun not intended.)

 

[General_Kenobi]

MeteorWayne, thanks for the response.

 

[brandbll]

This is why we need to get an orbiter back around Jupiter, we miss stuff like this. Imaghine how useful that would be right now. Sucks New Horizon wasn't just a tad behind schedule or it could have gotten us some pretty nice pictures.

The sad but realistic fact is that there will be no multibillion dollar missions to Jupiter (like Galileo) or Saturn (like Cassini) or to Uranus or Neptune that will arrive in our lifetime.

Whatever we can learn will be from reanalyzing the data we already have. There will be no more.

Well, i can't speak for you old timers but i'm only 25 so i still got a chance...

Not that i feel bad for you guys, as you got things like Apollo that i could never imagine the feeling of them happening in real time....

 

[grg1]

This impact sounds very significant due to Shoemaker Levy’ stunning impact of fifteen years ago. Has anyone looked at the ephemeris for Levi’s comet before break up?

Doom and gloom aside, perhaps Mr. Hawkins is right in his assertion that humans need to expand their horizons and leave the confines of earth to insure survival.

 

[yevaud]

I did get to see the dark "scars" afterwards, through my dad's 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain. Definitely left an impression on my mind. (Pun not intended.)

Yeah, it left quite an impact.

The below is approximately what I saw, though move the large impact zone in the N/E quadrant to the right, on the limb of the planet, such that you would be seeing a domelike glowing area. And, of course, the image is an IR/Thermal composite, so it wasn't quite as vivid - being only viewed optically. But yeah, it was something. Timing is everything, huh?

And it was continuous crappy weather here in Boston too. We had to cancel the "Public Night" event, but then there was a subsequent single evening that was clear, and I hustled my butt to the Observatory posthaste!

 

[scidogg]

If it was a collision of some sort, then judging from the size of the alleged impact area, we can thank Jupiter for possibly saving the Earth yet again.
However, if it's some sort of eruption, then things could get interesting in the next few months.
My guess? Maybe a comet.

 

[DatSpaceMan]

Our boy Jupiter took one for the team! Man he can take a lot of beating and still be standing...I suspect it was a comet then again it could be an asteroid. Now...If it was an eruption then that may make it interesting. Well, only time may tell. I guess we'll have to be patient, someone may figure it out...

 

[scidogg]

Yup !
The thing about Jupiter is that almost nothing fazes it. For instance, not long after Shoemaker-Levy everything apparently returned to normal without much fanfare.
It could possibly swallow a moon without so much as a burp.
Better check all its moons, just to be sure ! (highly unlikely).

 

[supercomputer]

is it......1 x 4 x 9?......
oh wait.....it's most likely all the bs coming from our politicians
no...i know...it's dark matter.............
or a blackhead pimple kinda thing...
what about a new kind of black hole?
maybe jupiter is a wanna be 8 ball
a bored space alien with a magic marker
space diversity
nasa turned off their secret flashlight
a statement like ...this is how we roll...
bums paradise..........
in truth, we will never know, but nasa will lie about it and create 3 billion
new theories about it, costing 6 trillion dollars