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Something May Have Just Hit Jupiter
The blog of Anthony Wesley, an Australian amateur astronomer, has what may be the first photos of a recent comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter, near the south pole. These photos are 11 hours old. The ones at the bottom of the page show three small dark spots in addition to the main dark mark. The Bad Astronomy blog picked up the story a few hours later — but cautions that what we're seeing may not be an impact event. This is all reminiscent of the closely watched impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter in 1994.
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/19/possible-new-impact-on-jupiter/
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Sorry, I could have worded it better. I'm not claiming intelligent design put Jupiter there, merely that Jupiter is doing what Jupiter does, and that this event is nothing out of the ordinary.
Very cool that it was captured (by an Aussie)
- There is no point, it's like a sphere -
>An amateur astronomer puts up pictures on his blog and we're comparing it to Shoemaker-Levy?
Levy is an amateur, his degree is in english lit. He won an amateur astronomers award.
(what I tried to post last time, bloody web2 crap)
Anthony's webserver has been slashdotted, but
he has copied the files to:
http://jupiter.samba.org/
He is now trying to login to his server so he
can redirect the pages to the above site.
As well as being an amateur astronomer, Anthony
is a keen Linux enthusiast. His home built
telescope is controlled by his Linux box.
Cheers, Tridge
Just like my point-and-shoot camera doesn't care whether something is 100 feet away or several miles away when I manually set it to infinite focus, the Hubble Space Telescope doesn't care whether something is a light second or several billion light years away. It has imaged every planet in the solar system except Mercury (including Earth), has imaged the moon, and once indirectly imaged the sun.
Can the slashdot admins please move the link in the story to the new site? I can't even log into my box to put the redirect in place...
http://jupiter.samba.org/
Thanks again Tridge, you're a lifesaver
Anthony
Well a lot of the stuff we worry about is roughly in the same disc as the planet...
True, but the size of their orbits makes it seem like playing foosball with two (weakly) magnetized needles for goalies and a bunch of iron fillings as the ball.
It's the amateurs that tend to be the first to discover unknown stuff like comets and stuff. The professionals are in general engaged in directed research and do not have the time to be poking around random areas of the sky to see if anything interesting is going on there. As someone mentioned, David Levy is himself an amateur.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Actually, "It was thought that the planet served to partially shield the inner system from cometary bombardment. However, recent computer simulations suggest that Jupiter doesn't cause a net decrease in the number of comets that pass through the inner Solar System, as its gravity perturbs their orbits inward in roughly the same numbers that it accretes or ejects them." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter#Interaction_with_the_Solar_System
It's not a vacuum cleaner, it's gravity isn't so powerful as to pull other objects out of orbit per se. Sure, it probably gets hit more than other planets, but that's not that impressive. It fills less of its Hill Sphere than Earth does, so it's more likely to scatter a passing object than absorb it. And a recent study by Grazier and Newman demonstrated that it probably is taking more pot-shots at Earth than it is protecting us.
If you look and compare some old pics of Jupiter and the current one showing the recent "impact"...You will notice there has been a darkened spot there before...