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This color-enhanced image shows a NASA Juno view of Jupiter in late 2020.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS; image processing by Tanya Oleksuik
Researchers using NASA’s Juno spacecraft to verify Jupiter’s auroras say they were lucky last spring and caught a very bright meteor explosion in the process.
Such impacts are not uncommon for Jupiter, as it is the largest planet in the solar system with very powerful gravity to boot.
“However, they are so fleeting that it is relatively unusual to see them,” Rohini Giles of the Southwest Research Institute said in a statement. “You have to be lucky to point a telescope at Jupiter at exactly the right time.”
Giles is the lead author of an article published this month in Geophysical Research Letters.
Amateur astronomers have used Earth-based telescopes to spot six impacts on the giant planet over the past decade, including one quite dramatic in 2019. But Giles and his colleagues had a clear advantage using Juno with Jupiter himself.
“This bright flash stood out in the data because it had very different spectral characteristics than the UV emissions from Jupiter’s auroras,” Giles explained.
SwRI scientists studied the area imaged by Juno’s UVS instrument on April 10, 2020 and determined that a large meteoroid had exploded in a bright fireball in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The UVS swath includes a segment of Jupiter’s northern auroral oval, shown purely in green, representing hydrogen emissions. In contrast, the bright spot (see enlargement) appears predominantly yellow, indicating significant emissions at longer wavelengths.
SWRI
Examining the brightness and other data from the flash, the team estimates it came from a space rock with a mass of 550 to 3300 pounds (249 to 1497 kilograms) impacting the Jovian atmosphere at an altitude of ‘approximately 225 kilometers. above the cloud tops of Jupiter.
Things slamming in Jupiter can be a big deal. The biggest snap ever seen on the planet was the impact of comet Shoemaker Levy 9 in 1994, which has been extensively studied.
“The impacts of asteroids and comets can have a significant impact on the stratospheric chemistry of the planet – 15 years after impact, comet Shoemaker Levy 9 was still responsible for 95% of the stratospheric water on Jupiter,” said Giles. “Continuing to observe impacts and estimate overall impact rates is therefore an important part of understanding the makeup of the planet.”
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