From Spaceweather.com
On August 20th at 18:22 UT, two amateur astronomers in Japan independently recorded an apparent impact on Jupiter. Masayuki Tachikawa of Kumamoto city was first to report the event. His movie of the fireball shows the fireball scintillating (twinkling) along with other features on the planet — persuasive evidence that this is a genuine event on Jupiter. Soon after Tachikawa made his report, Tokyo amateur astronomer Kazuo Aoki realized that he had recorded the fireball, too:
The ~800 km separation of the two observers rules out an event near Earth and reinforces the association of the fireball with Jupiter. The most likely explanation: A small comet or asteroid hit the giant planet.
This is the third time in only 13 months that amateur astronomers have detected signs of impact on Jupiter. The earlier events occured on July 19, 2009, and June 3, 2010. Jupiter is getting hit more often than conventional wisdom would suggest, leading many researchers to call for a global network of telescopes to monitor Jupiter 24/7 and measure the impact rate.
“Like the event of June 3rd, this fireball did not produce any visible debris,” notes John Rogers, director of the British Astronomical Association’s Jupiter section. “Here are some hi-resolution images taken 1-2 rotations before and 1-2 rotations after the event. As the observers commented, there was no visible mark (not in RGB, nor UV, nor methane), post-impact. Dark brown spots on the North Equatorial Belt were already there before the fireball.”
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Jupiter’s impact reminds us all of this:
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
On August 24, 2010 there were 1144 potentially hazardous asteroids.
| Asteroid |
Date(UT)
|
Miss Distance
|
Mag.
|
Size
|
| 2005 NZ6 |
Aug 14
|
60.5 LD
|
18
|
1.3 km
|
| 2002 CY46 |
Sep 2
|
63.8 LD
|
16
|
2.4 km
|
| 2010 LY63 |
Sep 7
|
56 LD
|
18
|
1.2 km
|
| 2009 SH2 |
Sep 30
|
7.1 LD
|
25
|
45 m
|
| 1998 UO1 |
Oct 1
|
32.1 LD
|
17
|
2.1 km
|
| 2005 GE59 |
Oct 1
|
77 LD
|
18
|
1.1 km
|
| 2001 WN5 |
Oct 10
|
41.8 LD
|
18
|
1.0 km
|
| 1999 VO6 |
Oct 14
|
34.3 LD
|
17
|
1.8 km
|
| 1998 TU3 |
Oct 17
|
69.1 LD
|
15
|
5.3 km
|
| 1998 MQ |
Oct 23
|
77.7 LD
|
17
|
1.9 km
|
| 2007 RU17 |
Oct 29
|
40.6 LD
|
18
|
1.0 km
|
| 2003 UV11 |
Oct 30
|
5 LD
|
19
|
595 m
|
| 3838 Epona |
Nov 7
|
76.8 LD
|
16
|
3.4 km
|
| 2005 QY151 |
Nov 16
|
77.7 LD
|
18
|
1.3 km
|
| 2008 KT |
Nov 23
|
5.6 LD
|
28
|
10 m
|
| 2002 EZ16 |
Nov 30
|
73.9 LD
|
18
|
1.0 km
|
| 2000 JH5 |
Dec 7
|
47 LD
|
17
|
1.5 km
|
 |
Notes: LD means “Lunar Distance.” 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.
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Gee, if only the telescopes had a fine enough resolution, then we could have actually seen the incoming black monolith…
Hey, it is 2010 after all. Although if we have (C)AGW proponents portending doom from even a single extra Watt per square meter being absorbed, imagine what could happen with another star, albeit a tiny one, in the same solar system with Earth. Here come the barbecue winters!