Astronomy

Scientists have found evidence that another object has bombarded Jupiter, exactly 15 years after the first impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 — a comet that had been seen to break into many pieces before the pieces hit Jupiter in 1994.

First discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on July 19, the Pacific Ocean-sized black spot is likely the result of a collision with an asteroid or comet. Following this, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, using the Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

The infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south-polar region, with a visibly dark “scar” and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths, and a warming of the upper troposphere with possible extra emission from ammonia gas detected at mid-infrared wavelengths.

This image was taken at 1.65 microns, a wavelength sensitive to sunlight reflected from high in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and it shows both the bright center of the scar (bottom left) and the debris to its northwest (upper left).

New pictures of Jupiter and its recent impact site keep pouring in, showing the rapidly growing atmospheric aftermath in increasingly greater detail.

Later in the week, the Hubble Space Telescope’s newest camera captured the sharpest visible-light picture to date of Jupiter’s latest feature. Not only did the image provide greater detail on the impact itself, but also it proved astronauts successfully serviced the telescope in May.

Operators of the Keck and Hubble telescopes originally scheduled other work for the week but decided to postpone their plans to better study the unfolding events on Jupiter. They join a multitude of amateur and professional astronomers across the world now training their eyepieces on the planet’s constantly changing spot.

NASA scientists estimate the colliding object was several hundreds of yards across and the force of its impact to have been thousands of times greater than the explosion in 1908 over the Siberian Tunguska River Valley.

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