Astronomers have spotted a bright flash from a huge space rock slamming into Jupiter. This impact flash, seen in October 2021, was the brightest one since comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the planet in 1994.
Impact flashes on other worlds are similar to meteorite strikes on Earth, but only the largest are visible from afar. Observing how these flashes affect other planets can help us understand what will happen to Earth鈥檚 atmosphere when similar-sized meteorites hit our planet.
at Kyoto University in Japan and his colleagues spotted the flash in 2021 using the Planetary Observation Camera for Optical Transient Surveys (PONCOTS), a small telescope dedicated to looking for impact flashes on Jupiter. 鈥淎ll of the previous impacts detected by ground-based observations were achieved by amateur astronomers,鈥� says Arimatsu. 鈥淭his is the first detection by a dedicated telescope.鈥�
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The fact that it was a dedicated telescope allowed the researchers to gather more data on this flash than previous ones, including a video. They found that the impact released an amount of energy equivalent to about 2 million tonnes of TNT, which indicates that the space rock that hit Jupiter had a mass of about 4000 tonnes.
The temperature of the flash was about 8000掳C. An impact like this on Earth could cause burning damage from the flash in addition to destruction from the actual impact, so understanding the temperatures of impact flashes could help us know what to expect should such a large object ever head our way.
鈥淲e found that the expected rate of such impacts on Jupiter is about once per year, 100 to 1000 times more frequent than that on Earth,鈥� says Arimatsu. This should make studying them on Jupiter far easier than studying them on Earth, he says 鈥� not to mention safer.
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