Hello, Glad it was Jupiter and not earth.

http://l.yimg.com/gh/cms/jul2009/072109_jupiter_strike_1248197269.jpg
In this image released by NASA/JPL showing a large impact on Jupiter's south polar region captured on Monday, July 20, 2009, by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Astronomers say Jupiter has apparently been struck by an object, possibly a comet

Tue Jul 21, 9:59 am ET
CANBERRA (Reuters Life!) – A large comet or asteroid has slammed into the Jupiter, creating an impact site the size of Earth, pictures by an Australian amateur astronomer show.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery using its large infrared telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, said computer programer Anthony Wesley, 44, who discovered the impact zone while stargazing at home.

News of Wesley's find on a backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope has stunned the astronomy world, with scientists saying the impact will last only days more.

Wesley said it took him 30 minutes to realize a dark spot rotating in Jupiter's clouds on July 19 was actually the first impact seen by astronomers since a comet collided with the giant planet in July 1994.

"I thought (it) likely to be just a normal dark polar storm," he said on his website http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro.


"However as it rotated further into view and the conditions improved I suddenly realized that it wasn't just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot," Wesley said from his home at Murrumbateman, north of Canberra.

Photographs show the impact zone, or "scar," near Jupiter's south polar region, with gases seen in infrared images.

"We are extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event. We couldn't have planned it better," NASA JPL scientist Glenn Orton told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

Orton confirmed the spot was an impact site and not a localized weather event in Jupiter's swirling surface, similar to the planet's famed red spot.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090721/lf_nm_life/us_jupiter_asteroid

The scar was not an impact which was missed ,but a rare natural phenomenon due to
a magnetic storm or some kind of magnetic reconnection event.A comet that can cause such a spot would not have been missed ,secondly we all know the intensity of jupiters magnetic field and these was one of its rare effects that we witnessed.In case it was a collision then the debis would fly much further into space you can compare it to pictures of former comets sluming into jupiter.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

More to prove to those of you who still think that the spot seen on jupiter was an impact and not a natural phenomenon called magnetic reconnection.

When magnetic fields become tangled, as they often do in the magnetosphere, they can merge together creating an explosive release of energy, whereby magnetic energy is converted directly into heat and charged-particle kinetic energy. Magnetic reconnection sparks solar flares, powers auroras, and even pops up in nuclear fusion chambers (tokamaks) on Earth. It is the ultimate driver of space weather impacting human technologies such as communications, navigation, and power grids.

Nasas magnetospheric multi scale mission

JOVIAN MAGNETOSPHERE AND DUNGY CYCLE

Even what was percived on earth as a comet strike in 1919 that leveled siberian forests could have been such a rare event of explosive magnetic reconnection if you read carefully what the wittnesses to that event said and secondly no crater or fragments were found or i am wrong,If i am not then be ware you never know when it may just occur again.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

I found it interesting that a time lapse movie of the motion of the new dark spot on Jupiter showed it to be moving substantially slower than nearby storm centers. If this is a hole punched in the atmosphere of Jupiter by a comet or asteroid, shouldn't that hole be keeping pace with the movement of nearby areas of the atmosphere? Michael

To be exact the Tunguska event happened on June 30 1908, although the first scientific mission to the spot, led by L.A.Kulik, was there only in 1927. I find it not believable that such an event might have been caused by the Earth's magnetic field, much weaker than Jupiter's. The most likely explanation is a small comet which disintegrated in the atmosphere.
Tullio

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Hubble reawakens, snaps image
of Jupiter scar



http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/07/24/hubble.jupiter.scar/index.html

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Thanks, SuperJoker, for posting that image and link. There seems to have been little scattering or smearing out of the remains of the supposed impact on Jupiter. It still appears to be an 8000 or 9000 miles long oblong. It also appears, in the main, to be made up of four dark ovals. Michael

One other puzzle is 1)no one saw it coming despite the various observers around the world,oky that one can be bittely swallowed .2)it never broke up on entering the atmosphere, comet shoe levy broke in to pieces but these on didnt? hitting an atmosphere like jupiters and you dont break into fragments may be it was made of titanium?

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Thanks, SuperJoker, for posting that image and link. There seems to have been little scattering or smearing out of the remains of the supposed impact on Jupiter. It still appears to be an 8000 or 9000 miles long oblong. It also appears, in the main, to be made up of four dark ovals. Michael

You're welcome, And as usual the smear is the size of the planet Earth, Pretty Humbling, The Ultimate weapon is still what cavemen used, Rocks. Go figure. :D

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

One other puzzle is 1)no one saw it coming despite the various observers around the world, okay that one can be bitterly swallowed .2)it never broke up on entering the atmosphere, comet shoe[maker-]levy broke in to pieces but these on didn't? hitting an atmosphere like Jupiters and you don't break into fragments may be it was made of titanium?

Nickel-Iron is good enough I'd think.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

But Jupiter has many moons and if the comet crossed between any of them surely there must at least be a slight change in the orbit of one of the moons after all
or that cant be measured yet from earth and space because evidence of that would nail the issue once and for all.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

COULD JUPITER HAVE ACTUALLY SILENTLY SWALLOWED ONE OF ITS 61 MOONS

61 MOONS OF JUPITER

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

Then we should call it Chronos, who had the habit of eating his sons. Jupiter was saved by his mother by hiding him in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete.

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Hello again, I see such great discussion about this gas giant. The Tunguska Explosion presumably caused by a comet, is the greatest space catastrophe humankind has ever witnessed. There are plenty of theories about Tunguska, from an alien spacecraft stopping the comet. (Really) Here is another link on Jupitor.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/26/weekinreview/oberbye-promo.jpg
Jupiter Takes One for the Team

Jupiter: Our Cosmic Protector? Sign in to Recommend




Published: July 25, 2009

Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.

An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.

That’s Jupiter doing its cosmic job, astronomers like to say. Better it than us. Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter’s overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar system where it could do for us what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for similar configurations — a giant outer planet with room for smaller planets in closer to the home stars — in other planetary systems as an indication of their hospitableness to life.

Anthony Wesley, the Australian amateur astronomer who first noticed the mark on Jupiter and sounded the alarm on Sunday, paid homage to that notion when he told The Sydney Morning Herald, “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

But is this warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector really true?

“I really question this idea,” said Brian G. Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, referring to Jupiter as our guardian planet. As the former director of the International Astronomical Union’s Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, he has spent his career keeping track of wayward objects, particularly comets, in the solar system.

Jupiter is just as much a menace as a savior, he said. The big planet throws a lot of comets out of the solar system, but it also throws them in.


Take, for example, Comet Lexell, named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Lexell. In 1770 it whizzed only a million miles from the Earth, missing us by a cosmic whisker, Dr. Marsden said. That comet had come streaking in from the outer solar system three years earlier and passed close to Jupiter, which diverted it into a new orbit and straight toward Earth.

The comet made two passes around the Sun and in 1779 again passed very close to Jupiter, which then threw it back out of the solar system.

“It was as if Jupiter aimed at us and missed,” said Dr. Marsden, who complained that the comet would never have come anywhere near the Earth if Jupiter hadn’t thrown it at us in the first place.

Hal Levison, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colo., who studies the evolution of the solar system, said that whether Jupiter was menace or protector depended on where the comets came from. Lexell, like Shoemaker Levy 9 and probably the truck that just hit Jupiter, most likely came from an icy zone of debris known as the Kuiper Belt, which lies just outside the orbit of Neptune, he explained. Jupiter probably does increase our exposure to those comets, he said.

But Jupiter helps protect us, he said, from an even more dangerous band of comets coming from the so-called Oort Cloud, a vast spherical deep-freeze surrounding the solar system as far as a light-year from the Sun. Every once in a while, in response to gravitational nudges from a passing star or gas cloud, a comet is unleashed from storage and comes crashing inward.

Jupiter’s benign influence here comes in two forms. The cloud was initially populated in the early days of the solar system by the gravity of Uranus and Neptune sweeping up debris and flinging it outward, but Jupiter and Saturn are so strong, Dr. Levison said, that, first of all, they threw a lot of the junk out of the solar system altogether, lessening the size of this cosmic arsenal. Second, Jupiter deflects some of the comets that get dislodged and fall back in, Dr. Levison said.

“It’s a double anti-whammy,” he said.

Asteroids pose the greatest danger of all to Earth, however, astronomers say, and here Jupiter’s influence is hardly assuring. Mostly asteroids live peacefully in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, whose gravity, so the standard story goes, keeps them too stirred to coalesce into a planet but can cause them to collide and rebound in the direction of Earth.

That’s what happened, Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said, to a chunk of iron and nickel about 50 yards across roughly 10 million to 100 million years ago. The result is a hole in the desert almost a mile wide and 500 feet deep in northern Arizona, called Barringer Crater. A gift, perhaps, from our friend and lord, Jupiter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/weekinreview/26overbye.html

From the article: An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.

Was it not fifteen years to date this happened to Jupitor??

Most likely chronos who silently swallowed one of his 10 mile moons orbiting it ,we should send something to go count them again to look for the missing son.That would definately be invisable because it was already orbiting it and something might have gone wrong ,perhaps one of the larger moons gravitational field threw it at jupiter.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

I agree somebody should be counting the moons -- I hope that's what someone is doing, at least, even if it's amateur astronomers, you know? Because I'm not so sure I agree with this guy's supposition that it was a comet being thrown OUR WAY by Jupiter. I've honestly never heard of that planet doing anything but the opposite, i.e. sucking in whatever came near it, because its gravitational pull was so strong. So I'm a bit dubious there.

My other question is, if something did indeed hit it, then what do you call that? If Jupiter's a "gas giant" then what's the term for "hole" or "depression" in gas?? It would be a crater on Mars, I mean. So I'm curious.

I agree with you 100%. They should be counting the moons and recalculating the position of every large moon if its in an orbit were its supposed to be because the can work backwards, retrospectively to find exactly what happened , we can even lend them our computing power of our machines if the dont have enough which i believe the do.

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

A satellite cannot crash into its planet because of angular momentum conservation, A foreign body coming from the asteroid belt or the Oort cloud is much more likely. It happened in 1994 and can happen again.
Tullio

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Think of 61 different sized satelites , orbiting in a complex manner. Jupiter has been called a mini solar system for that reason. Its true a satelite cant crush into the object thats its obiting , but it can be thrown at it by one of the other bodies orbiting it, perhaps the crushing of comet shoe maker levy that crushed some time back could have caused some slight imbalance but the results accumulated over a number of revolution and hence the effect we saw .

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

A stable system tends to remain stable unless perturbed. A 60+ body system is very difficult to describe in a mathematical way even by the most powerful computers. But it exists since many many years and was described starting with Galileo. The Galileo NASA mission to Jupiter has given every possible information on it and I am sure its findings are to be taken seriously.
If you go to www.nasa.gov/missions/galileo you'll find every possible information. The first one I found is that Jupiter has 62 satellites.

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