A small asteroid makes a huge flash by snapping Jupiter



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The apparent moment of impact on the world's largest solar system.

Ethan Chappel

A amateur astronomer captured a flash in the atmosphere of Jupiter Last month, it appeared as a bright spot of the size of the Earth compared to the giant gas planet. A new analysis of the images shows that the brief thrust was caused by a relatively small asteroid.

An idle GIF indicating that the flash is brightening and fading to the left center of the planet.

Ethan Chappel / EPSC

Ethan Chappel recorded the 1.5-second flash on August 7 with the help of a telescope in his backyard in Texas. At its peak, it corresponded to the brightness of Jupiter's moon Io.

Ramanakumar Sankar and Csaba Palotai of the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) analyzed the data to estimate that lightning could have been caused by the impact of a stony iron asteroid whose diameter was between 12 and 16 meters, or the size of a big bus. The object probably had a mass of about 450 tons and released the equivalent of an explosion of 240 kilotons of TNT when it crashed into the upper atmosphere from Jupiter about 80 km above the clouds of the planet.

That's about half of the energy released by the racing car that exploded on Russia during its break in the atmosphere in 2013, unleashing a shock wave that broke thousands of windows in the city of Chelyabinsk.

These new findings were presented Monday at a meeting of the Congress of the European Planetary Society in Geneva.

Ricardo Hueso, a physicist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, is one of the developers of the Open Source DeTeCt software specifically designed to identify impacts on Jupiter. Chappel used DeTeCt to analyze his video of the impact of August. Hueso said the impact seems to be the second brightest of the six captured since 2010.

"Most of these objects hit Jupiter unobserved by observers on Earth," said Hueso. "However, we now estimate between 20 and 60 similar objects impacted by Jupiter each year."

If that's the case, a lot of lights show that no one is there, including some that may be brighter than the flash of the size of the planet we saw last month.

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