Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Something large just slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere and exploded

Filmed by an amateur astronomer in Austria using a 20-centimeter telescope , he posted his findings on YouTube.



The event has now been confirmed as legit, and likely represents the entry and destruction in the Jovian atmosphere of a rock about two to three hundred feet in diameter.  

Due to Jupiter’s huge mass and resulting gravitational pull, the object must’ve have been accelerating rapidly, releasing a tremendous amount of kinetic energy on impact.  The pressures involved as the rock rams into the atmosphere at these speeds are gigantic. The air and rock heat up from the friction, the rock starts to fall apart, and each chunk then gets hot, and so on, creating a very rapid cascade that releases the energy of motion in just a second or two.

An event like that here on Earth would be memorable, to say the least.

4 comments:

  1. Cool, thanks.. Now if we could get a slightly smaller one to hit you know where :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Credits at the clip end give a different location for the observer.

    ReplyDelete