Jupiter just got hit by a celestial object. And
there is no need to panic because Jupiter goes through this sort of events all
the time. In the video below, a relatively small blip of light can be clearly
witnessed on the right side of the gas giant. From here it may look
insignificant, but the resultant explosion was remarkably powerful. An amateur
Austrian astronomer caught this event by using his 20-centimetre telescope.
As the tiny flash could have been the consequence
of a mechanical issue, a second video - recorded at the same time with a
28-centimetre telescope in Ireland - was used to verify the first, approving
the impact. As seen how big the blip looks, the piece of space-rock that struck
Jupiter must have been huge to produce that type of impact, right? Well, not
quite.
According to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, that the
asteroid or comet possibly only measured a few hundred feet in diameter. Nevertheless,
when it comes to these type of collisions, the size of the comet or asteroid
doesn’t really matter as much as the mass of what it’s striking.
Plait explains: “On average (and ignoring orbital velocity), an
object will hit Jupiter with roughly five times the velocity it hits Earth, so
the impact energy is 25 times as high. The asteroid that burned up over
Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was 19 metres across, and it exploded with the
energy of 500,000 tons [454,000 tonnes] of TNT. Now multiply that by 25, and
you can see how it doesn’t take all that big a rock to hit Jupiter for us to be
able to see it from Earth.
At these huge speeds, hitting the atmosphere is
like slamming into a wall. A lot of people get understandably confused how an
asteroid can explode due to air, but the pressures involved as it rams through
the atmosphere at these speeds are ridiculously huge.”
