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In an incredible coincidence where a paper was released today about the 2009 impact event on Jupiter, the same amateur astronomer who captured that event also captured a new impact Jupiter that occurred at about 20:30 UT today (June 3, 2010). Anthony Wesley from Australia captured the flash of an impact, which was also captured and confirmed by Christopher Go of the Philippines. Watch Go’s video here. Go said he shot it with a blue filter. Word is that Anthony is processing his video, and we’ll post it when available.
Update: We’ve added Anthony Wesley’s color image of the impact, above (you can see the original image below) and also added Anthony’s video of the event, below.
And here’s a direct link to Anthony Wesley’s video (mwv) of the impact.
Here’s Anthony’s original greyscale image:
That my friends, is nuts. Wow.
I love the way yet again and again amateur astronomers are indispensable to the pursuit of astronomy, personalty I think government grants or some form of funding should be made available to assist the amateur astronomer.
The coincidence of the above gives a good indicator of probably how often Jupiter cleans its neighborhood.
coincidence? i dont think so…that must be a chain of a ruptured asteroid…maybe more to come!
I see most of the news online plays up the “coincidence” angle of this story. Since the Sánchez-Lavega paper was posted on arXiv.org May 14th, at least _three_ press releases have seen wide circulation on the internet. So….”coincidence? i dont think so” is apt ( not to take anything away from either event :)).
BTW, the Sánchez-Lavega paper is available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2312
In response to Spoodle58, I’ll note that back in the late 90s, we had a program at the STScI which allowed amateur astronomers to compete for HST observing time. Several of these amateurs were successful in winning time on HST and went on to publish their observations. See http://www.stsci.edu/~mutchler/amateur.html for a review of the program. Unfortunately the program ended in 1997. But there was a time when amateur astronomers were using HST!
ROTFL! I like the synchronicity…. and Nancy practicing her ‘cosmic consciousness’ on us! No friction there! ~@; )
Wow, I love the video. Is that real-time? It looks real-time.
We need more video of planets and moons. I know it’s not very practical because things are pretty static for the most part, and good video is huge and therefore difficult to store and transmit, but when something interesting is captured on video it sure is captivating! Imagine a high quality video from Enceladus’s surface of the geysers… Mmmmm….
Thanks BillGawne, that was a good read.
Good old Jupiter.. taking one for the team as usual, so Earth doesn’t have to (very often, at least).
Anyone have any idea why we are seeing so many impacts lately?
Denise,
Most likely because there’s a lot more observing going on, because the equipment used to record the observations is far better (back in ‘the old days’ no one took video records of the planets, to take just one example), and because those doing the observing are more likely to spot collisions (back in the old days, something like this would likely have been considered an anomaly, if noticed at all).
It’s a bit like supernovae: if you look through the records (they’re online somewhere), and select for only NGC and IC objects (i.e. pretty darn bright, nearby galaxies), you’ll see some curious patterns. For example, back in the old days, supernovae in galaxies with large, southern decs seemed much rarer than those with corresponding northern decs – can you guess why this is?
Sunday should be another impact or was this object just by itself.
We are seeing more impacts lately, because we have the capability to not only see it, but cheaply record it so others believe the story. 20 Years ago there wasn’t as many ametuer astronomers… today there are thousands more, with much better equipment; including the Internet to quickly post and verify with each other what is seen.
Think about how often a meteor larger than 3 feet large enters Earth’s atmosphere… quite a lot. Jupiter, which is quite a bit larger and even more massive bends space many times more than Earth; Jupiter is going to catch/capture quite a few asteroids, including those hundreds to thousands of meters in diameter. Just every once in a while we see it, or the after effects.
So it is likely this happens a lot more than we actually know. Everything has to be just perfect to view all but the largest explosions near Jupiter, because of its own brightness and distance away, not to mention our own atmospheres distortion of light, greatly affecting anything small and detailed. Then there are other factors… blink at the wrong time, focus on another local spot, attribute it to some distortion, reflection, ignorance etc. Not come forward for fear of being scrutinized or shyness. A lot of variables to overcome each time.
Update: Today, 06.12.10, NASA Science News (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/11jun_missingdebris/) reported that the impact seen by Anthony Wesley and others may NOT have been an asteroid or comet.. but something else entirely, due to the absence of accompanying debris.
Mirror matter anyone? ~@; )