Slashdot Mirror
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.
An amateur astronomer puts up pictures on his blog and we're comparing it to Shoemaker-Levy?
Bad Astronomy says "it's jumping the gun to call it an impact event before we get more observations". I've got an idea for the next Slashdot article: "Asteroid heading towards earth - or maybe just spot on lense".
I hope they can get the Hubble scope on it fast, without bureaucratic or technical hurdles.
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry, didn't mean to come across like a jackass.
Yeah, till the day one of them changes the orbit of what would have been just something to observe in the sky, to something that knocks us clean out of our orbit.
Yes, but in your rush to denigrate people who believe differently than yourself you did.
Eeriest Slashdot story title of the year?
As well as being an amateur astronomer, Anthony is a keen Linux enthusiast. His home built telescope is controlled by his Linux box.
But not tonight, I bet it's not controlling a damn thing.
John
It parses far too easily as a joke on spousal abuse.
Does it parse any other way!?
Well, I guess it could be parsed as planetary lesbian domestic partner abuse, if you really want to be PC.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
So? here at Slashdot we make jokes of murderers, pedophiles, recently deceased people, people with disabilities, etc. And if we don't care about *those*, I don't see why we'd care about simple domestic abuse.
Plus, it provides some much-needed relief from the endless 2010 allusions being posted here.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I've often heard Jupiter called the "vacuum cleaner" of space in that it sucks up foreign objects that stray into our solar system. Be thankful we have this planet among us. It's sorta like our protector.
Life is not for the lazy.
Well be careful, it could also something like what has happened on the 2010 movie starting to occur, keep on watching maybe this "spot" will propagate to the whole planet then afterward, Jupiter will become our second Sun. ;-))
Welcome to true global warming !
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Well, given that the planets were FORMED from colliding objects, it's not really surprising that collisions are still happening.
He was denigrating a notion, not a group of people. The fact that there exist some people who take criticism of their worldview as a personal attack is a matter for those particular people to come to terms with.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Dude. If he had the technology to place a nearby asteroid in our orbit, then lack of rare minerals would be a minor inconvenience.