[VIDEO] Something Just Crashed Into Jupiter

By Ana Verayo, | March 30, 2016

A possible asteroid or comet crashed into Jupiter on March 17 that can be seen from 665 million kilometers away.

A possible asteroid or comet crashed into Jupiter on March 17 that can be seen from 665 million kilometers away.

The biggest planet in our solar system apparently got hit by an equally massive asteroid or comet that has been observed by some amateur skygazers, capturing this latest collision of Jupiter on camera.

On March 17, amateur astronomer John McKeon from Swords, Ireland was observing the gas giant via telescope as he captured an incredible time lapse video of a space object hitting Jupiter. Using a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and his ASI120mm camera, McKeod was capturing Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede in transit, where he suddenly saw a space object striking Jupiter.

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In a description on his Youtube video, McKeon describes how he captured this event, he says that the original purpose of this imaging session was to capture this time lapse and this impact was a happy coincidence in the second, last capture of the night.   

According to asteroid expert Paul Chodas from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it might still be too early to determine the exact details of this space object crashing into Jupiter, however he says that there is a greater chance that this object is an asteroid and not a comet. Chodas adds, this is more likely to be an asteroid since there are more of them.

Since it is not yet clear what hit Jupiter, this impact was also documented by many amateur astronomers all over the world, such as another one from Mödling, Austria where Gerrit Kernbauer posted his video of the impact from Youtube according to Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait. Plait posted this video and describes this impact occurring around just after midnight on March 17. Kernabuer on the other hand used a Skywatcher Newton 200/1000 Telescope to document the Jupiter impact.

In his video description, he wrote: seeing the impact was not the best and I hesitated processing the videos. Ten days later, I looked through these videos and found a strange light spot that appeared for less than a second on the edge of Jupiter's disc. Remembering comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the only explanation for this impact is that an asteroid or comet entered Jupiter's high atmosphere and burning up, exploding real fast.

In 1994, fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter where astronomers and stargazers watched the incredible, once in a lifetime event from Earth. The impacts are so powerful that it left massive scars that were visible on Jupiter through a telescope, lingering for months after the violent impacts.

Chodas adds that this event is one of many impacts in the solar system and Jupiter experiences more impacts than others, drawing in a lot of asteroids and comets, where these impact flashes on Jupiter can be seen about once a year on average.

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