Anthony Wesley in Australia says he saw another impact on Jupiter today- this time capturing the immediate flash on video. No obvious aftereffects, so far, but Europeans and Americans with telescopes might want to take a look tonight...
link

John

Amazing! Can't wait for the video.

Looks so small compared to other impacts we've witnessed, but to think it's still many megatons of energy...

Holy crap! I just now noticed the tweet from Emily about this & ran over to post...you're right on top of it, John!

Jupiter splat-spotting just might become an emerging sub-specialty of amateur astronomy! (Hmm...wonder if anyone's monitoring Jupiter's radio emissions 24/7? Suppose that these things might produce a burst of static or even a whistle?)

It's interesting to compare to the Galileo images of one of the SL9 impact flashes, which looked MUCH brighter. So we might not expect an impact scar from this one...

John

I just spoke with Anthony on the phone and he tells me that the whole event lasted about two seconds from appearing to fading.
Couldn't see any immediate after effects, but thought it may take until the next rotation to see anything.
He is away from his normal computer set up at the moment but will be pulling together the video in the next few hours.
Anthony tells me that he was recording at 60 frames per second when the event occured, so there'll be lots of video goodness to view.

Apparently Christopher Go in the Philippines saw the flash at the exact same time, so it's definitely real. This is proof that Jupiter gets no moments of privacy these days.

John

Now we just need one at Saturn.

I was gonna say "Jupiter sucks", but that's both very wrong & very right...

Hope that a probable origin can be determined for the object responsible for this latest strike. Apparently, the one last year is thought to be from one of the loose Trojan associations; lots of potential interesting questions re rates of depletion & replenishment of those regions if this one's from the same source.

Christopher Go's video of the Jovian fireball is now online: http://astro.christone.net/jupiter/jupiterimpact.wmv

Wow!!! Thanks, VP.

That brief 'halo' around the impact: reflections off of the surrounding cloud layers/upper haze?

Amazing! Well done!

For members with scopes in Europe, the impact site reaches the bright limb of Jupiter at around 06/04 02:52 UTC (might as well also image a transit of Jupiter by Europa occurring at the time). It crosses the central meridian around 05:15 UTC and reaches the evening terminator around 07:22 UTC. For the next opportunity, it reaches the bright limb at 06/04 12:43 UTC, cross the central meridian around 15:07 UTC, and reaches the evening terminator around 17:16 UTC.

Click to view attachment

Here's a link to a page with Anthony's video.
http://jupiter.samba.org/jupiter/20100603-...pact/index.html
Note: 45mb

Edit: Just noticed that in the top left hand corner of the image, for a moment you can see a moon in view.

There's now a RGB image from Anthony on the IceInSpace.com forum.

What a luck, he say he witnessed it real time!

SL9 impacts occurred in darkness, this impact is on the daylight hemisphere, so it may be difficult to make comparisons based on brightness??

I agree, we need to be careful about comparing the brightness of the two given differences in detector sensitivity, exposure time, background brighness, etc. It would be interesting to see if a power output could be derived from the images Wesley and Go took of the flash.

My impression on viewing Wesley's video is that there were subsidiary flashes separated in both space and time, perhaps indicating a pre-fragmented impactor. It's hard to be sure because of the way the whole image jumps around, though. (I'm sure somebody here could fix that. )

Pretty sure that's an artifact due to atmospheric seeing.

A different look at Anthony Wesley brilliant video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ZzUL1dCRg
Here I created a version in negative...interesting effect.

Chris Go also caught the impact, though his was under far better seeing conditions. as mentioned earlier.

ADMIN: Same video as in Post#9

True John, though wasn't Galileo's observations taken in IR wavelengths? Big difference compared to visual wavelengths.

Correction: I see the Galileo observations were in Green light. My bad!

I read somewhere that the 2009 Wesley impact had caused astronomers to revise their estimate of the flux of Jupiter impacts. (I can't locate the reference, and don't recall if it the discussion was specific to a particular kind of impactor.)

Is it premature to discuss whether the 2010 Wesley/Go impact will suggest a further revision?

TTT

The impact of a large object with Jupiter in July 2009

On 2009 July 19, we observed a single, large impact on Jupiter at a planetocentric latitude of 55^{\circ}S. This and the Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) impacts on Jupiter in 1994 are the only planetary-scale impacts ever observed. The 2009 impact had an entry trajectory opposite and with a lower incidence angle than that of SL9. Comparison of the initial aerosol cloud debris properties, spanning 4,800 km east-west and 2,500 km north-south, with those produced by the SL9 fragments, and dynamical calculations of pre-impact orbit, indicate that the impactor was most probably an icy body with a size of 0.5-1 km. The collision rate of events of this magnitude may be five to ten times more frequent than previously thought. The search for unpredicted impacts, such as the current one, could be best performed in 890-nm and K (2.03-2.36 {\mu}m) filters in strong gaseous absorption, where the high-altitude aerosols are more reflective than Jupiter's primary cloud.

http://planetary.org/blog/article/00002524/


http://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.p...amp;mission=hst

Interesting that no high-atmospheric signs have been observed soon after the "impact". Whereas a comet (a gravelly, low-cohesion body) disintegrates high in the atmosphere, making a shotgun-style debris pattern over a large, high-altitude area, a more cohesive rocky body behaves like a rifle bullet and punches through the upper cloud deck(s) and disintegrates at a lower level. Think of it as a small entrance wound-large exit wound. I wonder if we'll see some changesin that belt in the next few weeks as the disruption diffuses upward?

--Bill

It's all about mass, Bill. I'd rather have a small hammer dropped on my foot than 16 tons of feathers.

This story has almost dropped from view except Leigh Fletcher's tweet: "Almost there with our study of the #Jupiter impact of 2010 - Hubble has taken some images, waiting with baited breath to see what's there..."
What happend on the infrared observations? Any detection of heat even if no black scar?
Any news Emily? Astro0? Jason?

Floyd, what makes you think that we have any inside information? Occasionally we get some first hand news and can pass it on, but these things just don't happen overnight. Remember it took about 6 months for the Hubble report to come out on the 2009 impact.

If there's any news to be had, then it'll come out in due time.
You may get a heads up through UMSF or not ... Stay tuned, stay patient.

Astro0's right. I certainly don't have any inside information, just lots of RSS feeds and blogs I read and mailing lists I subscribe to. Oh, and there's this fabulous online forum where lots of other people who read lots of RSS feeds and random blogs in multiple languages post notes about interesting news...

I wish I knew about that one.

Phil

I was sure you all had inside information—I'm totally disillusioned

I'm not sure anyone who posts at UMSF is patient—sort of antithetical to being curious:

Curious / Eager -------------------- vs ------------------- Disengaged / Dead
Impatient / Intense --------------------------------------Patient / Clueless

Are we there yet

HST image released, no sign of the impact.
http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archi...s/2010/20/full/

But look at all those dark spots popping up at the bottom of the SEB!!!!

I wonder if the possibility of this being a very bright bolt of lightning has been looked at and rejected.
To the unititiated, it is not obvious that a bolt of lightning of this magnitude (ie optical energy) would be more unlikely than
a fireball of the same energy.

Lightning has been observed on Jupiter before, but only by spacecraft that are both there, and looking at the planet's night side.
Jovian lightning simply isn't strong eough to view from across the solar system (with current technology at least), and especially in the illuminated hemisphere.

I'm having trouble with seeing images on HST site.
Can anybody post that new image of Jupiter here at UMSF or link to anywhere else?

Thank you!

OK I find it somewhere.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1010/

That works for me.

Do you know of a paper or report where someone has done the sums and concluded that it would simply be too faint?
Remember, Jupiter is 5 times as far away from the sun as the Earth, hence its surface brightness, given the same
albedo, should be 25 times fainter than that of the Earth.

The answer to the question is not obvious. We need a jovian lightning expert..

How about this?

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/scien..._missingdebris/

It doesn't give you the math, but clearly experts have thought about it.

Phil

IIRC, the they first attempted to image lightning on Jupiter's night side with Galileo, they did not set the exposure right and the light reflecting off Io oversaturated the images.

Phil,

I'll buy that. Thanks.

Tolis.

Actually those moonlit images successful detected lightning- see here. There are other Galileo lightning images too, in addition to those from Voyager, New Horizons and perhaps (I'm not sure) Cassini.

John

Eh. I think someone probably figured you can't see garden-variety lightning because it would have been seen already as it is so frequent. I think some people who study transient luminous events (sprites/jets/elves) might think it looks interesting, although it's extremely bright, a bit long-lived and immensely large. A TLE's worth thinking about, but the only way you'd convince people that this was one was to see more of them. Doesn't look like plain old lightning.

Frankly, you'd also think that TLEs would occur far more frequently if this event in fact was one. Jupiter is under almost constant observation by amateurs with professional-grade equipment; we should have seen a few more of these over the past five years or so, at least.

Still, it's certainly valid to explore reasonable alternative explanations for this observation.

I'm still thinking that cohesive rocky body, behaving like a rifle bullet and punching through the upper cloud deck and disintegrating at a lower level, is the most reasonable explanation. Remember, the SEB has faded and we are seeing a lot of obscuring high-altitude cirrus clouds.

--Bill

Fresh off the presses of Volcanopele's Gish Bar Times: another probable Jupiter impact observed yesterday! Story & links:

http://www.gishbartimes.org/2010/08/meteor...n-jupiters.html

EDIT: Not yesterday...20 Aug around 1822 UTC.

Well, yesterday-ish. It was recorded Saturday morning in Japan.

Obvious coolness of the impact aside, that planet is starting to look like a cartoon character. Seriously, Jupiter, pull yourself together!

Any comparisons between Jupiter and Leela from Futurama is uncalled for. We shan't have that here, good sir.

You got something against cartoon characters, Gordan?

Mass media's beginning to pick up the story. Jason, as far as I can tell you & J. Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope broke this in English before anyone else...well done!

HST is going to get tired of all the "Quick! Look at Jupiter!"

So this is the 4th know impact event at Jupiter, correct?

Shoemaker-Levy was the first (assuming it was one object to start with), next was in 2009, and now two this year.
Talk about taking a pounding!