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An asteroid or icy object collided with the gas giant Jupiter on September 13, where it eventually exploded in the thick clouds of the planet. A Brazilian space photographer, José Luis Pereira, captured the rarely seen solar system event, which is shown in the intriguing images below.
The object was about tens of meters wide (maybe some 120 to 160 feet wide, maybe more, maybe less). Traveling at high speed, it traveled deeper and deeper into Jupiter’s heavy atmosphere, where it experienced strong friction and warmed as it fell through the planet’s clouds.
“At one point it exploded,” said Peter Vereš, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, a collaborative research group between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory.
The resulting flash of one or two seconds is similar to the bright flash sometimes seen on Earth when a decent-sized asteroid explodes into the atmosphere, a phenomenon known as an “air burst.” In 2013, for example, a powerful aerial explosion occurred when a boulder about 56 feet wide exploded over Russia, releasing “30 times the energy released by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.” , said the European Space Agency.
Today, a few days after the event, astronomers don’t think the object could have been too large (say, over 330 feet in diameter, or 100 meters) as the impact would have left lasting holes in the Jupiter clouds. In 1994, for example, massive pieces (about 800 meters wide) of the shattered comet Comet Shoemaker – Levy 9 left giant gashes in the Jovian atmosphere that lasted for months.
“It blew up these giant, Earth-sized holes in the clouds,” said Paul Byrne, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. But Jupiter, which is 11 times the size of our planet, was not significantly disturbed by this much smaller and more recent collision. “Jupiter is so big that he can ignore this,” Byrne said.
Still, the impact and the resulting explosion certainly produced a bright flash. Astronomers and other researchers use this brightness to estimate the size of an impacting object, explained Cathy Plesko, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who studies the impacts of asteroids and comets. A larger object creates a more energetic explosion and flash.
(Even tiny objects produce vivid flashes. The common shooting star is a rice-sized meteor burning in the earth’s atmosphere. “It’s pretty bright for a grain of rice,” Plesko said.)
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Objects often strike Jupiter. It is a large target with a strong gravitational pull. But it’s less common for someone to record it, like photographer Pereira (amateur astronomers, watching the sky vigilantly, have already captured some impacts on Jupiter). Plus, Pereira accomplished this with an amateur telescope, not through a powerful space observatory. “It really is an incredible achievement,” noted Byrne.
Impact images show that our solar system, which is now around 4.5 billion years old, is still a bustling and vibrant place. Of course, there aren’t as many giant rocks that regularly crash into each other, as when the chaotic development of the solar system began a few billion years ago. But collisions (sometimes significant) always occur.
“It’s calmed down a lot, but it’s not calm,” Byrne said.
This reality is a poignant reminder that threats to Earth, especially those from asteroids, are looming in the solar system. It’s a cause for concern, but no alarm, Byrne said. NASA, federal agencies and global organizations are currently studying the solar system for potentially threatening objects. The largest boulders – half a mile wide or more that can trigger major extinctions on Earth – are well accounted for. So far, NASA has located around 90 percent of these big boys. “We think we know where the bigger ones are,” Plesko said. Fortunately, none to our knowledge pose an imminent threat to Earth any time soon.
“It’s extremely unlikely that anything giant will come out of nowhere and hit us,” Byrne said.
But many small rocks remain a threat. As Mashable previously reported, scientists estimate that thousands of near-Earth objects (objects in the Earth’s vicinity) larger than 460 feet have yet to be found. These rocks can devastate urban areas. An asteroid measuring about 100 to 170 feet in diameter left a 600-foot-deep crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago. “An impact event of similar size today could destroy a city the size of Kansas City,” Lunar and Planetary Institute impact expert David Kring told NASA this year.
That’s why NASA is planning a historic test of our ability to redirect a “small” asteroid (525 feet in diameter) in 2022, an experiment called the DART mission. The DART spacecraft is designed to crash into the asteroid, slightly altering its trajectory.
Indeed, rocks abound in our solar system. A relatively small rock that burns in Jupiter’s atmosphere is a trivial phenomenon that occurs in our spatial neighborhood. But it is fascinating to see. And it helps astronomers assess exactly what’s going on through our solar system.
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