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Some planets take a lot of hits for us.
Jupiter, the largest gas giant in the solar system, has just been struck by an asteroid, according to an initial tweet from ESA operations.
As the strongest gravitational force after the sun, it’s not that rare. But it serves as a reminder that while Earth does not move in a shooting range of doomsday asteroids, asteroid detection technology must continue to develop, lest one day we wake up to learn. that this is the last time we will live before an extinction. – level impact.
Jupiter receives a lot of punching in the face
On September 13, 2021, at approximately 6:39 p.m. EDT, amateur astronomers monitored and recorded an extremely bright flash of what appeared to be an impact on Jupiter. Harald Paleske from Germany was recording the shadow of Jupiter’s moon, Io, as it passed the planet. But other astronomers involved included José Luis from Brazil, Michel Jacquesson and Jean-Paul Arnould from France, Simone Gelelli from Italy, and Didier Walliang and Alexis Desmougin from the Lorraine Astronomical Society, also in France. Many also filmed the event and suspect an impact on Jupiter.
Although still unconfirmed, the putative event would mark only the eighth impact observed on Jupiter since the initial impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994, which disintegrated into separate parts when the immense tidal forces of Jupiter tore it apart, turning the singular asteroid into a rapid fire of glorious chaos. Unfortunately, no one on Earth could see the explosions, as the impacts occurred on the other side of Jupiter. But a 7.2ft (2.2m) Hawaii-based telescope photographed the heat signatures of each impact site as they rotated in sight. The Hubble Space Telescope also took dark images of the dark spots of blue color scattered under the clouds, aptly named “scars”.
NASA Improves Earth’s Planetary Defense Against Near-Earth Objects
At the time of writing, scientists do not know how often Jupiter is impacted by something so massive or at such high speed that it generates an impact lightning bolt that we can see from Earth, but the consensus is that it is ‘is quite often; between 20 and 60 times a year. If the Earth were to experience large impacts with the same frequency, its surface could look very different, as could anything that survived. But luckily, Jupiter’s incredibly strong gravitational field is gigantic and accelerates incoming meteorites to inhuman speeds, multiplying the kinetic energy of incoming bodies by orders of magnitude, which is proportional to the level of energy released during the impact (think about how baseballs hurt more if they hit you faster).
But Jupiter does not suffer all the cosmic blows directed at the Earth. Some scientists suspect we are late for another asteroid impact of similar magnitude to the one that spelled the end of the dinosaurs. These occur once every 50 to 60 million years. Luckily for us, NASA gave the green light for a new space telescope, called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor), in June. And it’s designed to enhance Earth’s planetary defense network by detecting cosmic bodies with potentially dangerous orbital paths. “[W]We believe there are about 25,000 NEOs large enough to wipe out a region like Southern California, “said Amy Mainzer, NEO Survey project leader, in a statement from the University of Arizona.” Once they exceed about 450 feet in diameter, they can cause serious regional damage. We want to find them, and as many smaller ones as possible. It could take a few years to launch, and we have other ways of detecting NEOs. But whenever a monumental impact erupts from Jupiter’s cloud tops, remember: were us.
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