When you are big and mighty, you are bound to get unwanted attention, and when it comes to Jupiter, that's exactly what happens. The massive gravitational pull of the planet has been the reason why massive objects are pulled towards it. This time an asteroid has hit the planet.
The Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter has seen a unique event where an asteroid streaked through the upper atmosphere of the planet in April 2020. The details, released now, paint a picture of the faraway event that led to a short-lived disruption in the atmosphere picked up by Juno.
The brief emission raised scientific curiosity since it was not similar to auroras captured on the planet. The duration and spectrum are consistent with a meteor in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the team said in a blog update. Scientists estimate that the object that crashed into Jupiter was anything between 250-5000 kilograms in mass.
"Jovian meteors have previously been observed by the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft and by amateur observers on Earth. Each new observation helps to constrain the overall impact rate, an important element to understanding the planet’s composition," the Juno team said in an update.
The event was recorded by the ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS) on Juno, which studies ultraviolet light specially focussed on the planet's auroras as it looks for gasses like hydrogen.
NOT THE FIRST SPACE ROCK TO INVADE JUPITER
This is not the first object to hit the Jovian atmosphere. The planet was hit in September last year and the event was captured by amateur astronomer José Luis Pereira from Brazil. So far eight such impacts have been confirmed since July 1994.
Astronomer Ethan Chappel from Texas in 2019 observed a meteor crash into Jupiter with his Celestron 8 telescope, spotting a flash of light in the planet's South Equatorial Belt (SEB). The previous such impact was spotted in 2017 when Sauveur Pedranghelu, a French amateur from Corsica, detected an impact on the planet's polar region.
Skygazers in Japan had seen another strike in the Jovian atmosphere in October last year when they observed a bright flash of light emanating from the planet’s atmosphere in the northern hemisphere. The strike, which was visible for about four seconds, was confirmed by observations done by a team led by Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Japan's Kyoto University.
The first such impact to be ever seen and recorded from Earth on the biggest planet of the solar system was Shoemaker-Levy 9 that in 1994 took a death plunge on the gas giant. Such impact events reveal crucial details about the surface they hit, just as by studying Shoemaker-Levy 9 scientists were able to track high-altitude winds on Jupiter for the first time that emerged from the impact.
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2022-03-11 06:13:28Z
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