On August 7 , Ethan Chappel was the only human to witness a planetary impact . He caught a small asteroid hitting Jupiter and produce a bright split second of light . Researchers have been able-bodied to practice his observation to work out the size of it and character of meteorite and even how often these object smash into the gas giant .
Chappel was conducting video observations when he see the flash , and used exposed - author software system calledDeTeCtto analyze his footage . DeTeCt was project by fellow amateur uranologist Marc Delcroix and Ricardo Hueso from the University of Basque Country to study such impingement .
The datum were dissect by the duo as well as severally by Ramanakumar Sankar and Csaba Palotai of the Florida Institute of Technology . The data point to a stony - branding iron meteorite 12 - 16 time ( 39 - 52 feet ) across matter 450 tons . The meteorite disintegrated about 80 km ( 50 mile ) above Jupiter ’s swarm and liberate energy equivalent to 200–250 kilotons of TNT . That ’s more or less half of the takings of the Chelyabinsk meteor or about 15 clock time the vigor free by the Hiroshima nuclear bomb calorimeter .
“ This is the first impact flash at Jupiter line up using the DeTeCt computer software , " Delcroix suppose in astatement . " These detection are highly rarefied because the impact flash are faint , short and can be easily missed while keep an eye on the planet for hours . However , once a flash is found in a telecasting recording it can be analysed to quantify the vitality postulate to make it visible at a distance of 700 million km . ”
The project has been function for geezerhood and Delcroix and Hueso have now present some results at the European Planetary Science Congress & Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical SocietyJoint Meeting2019 in Geneva . They were able to give a better picture of impacts in the Jupiter and Saturn systems .
“ With six encroachment flashes observed in 10 years since the first flash was discovered in 2010 , scientist are becoming more confident in their estimates of the impact rate of these objects in Jupiter , " say Hueso . " Most of these objects strike Jupiter without being spotted by observers on Earth . However , we now estimate 20 - 60 interchangeable objects wallop with Jupiter each year . Because of Jupiter ’s large size of it and gravitative field this wallop rate is 10,000 times big than the shock rate of similar objects on Earth . ”
The two hope that more and more astronomers will engage DeTeCt so that the analysis can be polish .
