On September 10, a flash was detected by amateur astronomers on Jupiter. Similar to the fireball detected and imaged by Chris Go and Anthony Wesley in 2010, this appears to have been located near the equator and early reports suggest that no “scar” was left on the planet — either the object burned up before it plunged deep enough into Jupiter’s cloud tops to “dredge” up material showing the characteristic black spot of earlier impacts (2009, 1994) or the object was simply too small to make a dent in the big planet.
Conditions were generally poor to fair, but it was a beautiful, cool autumn morning to be out. Here’s an IR image when the possible impact site was crossing the central meridian.
And a color image taken a bit later, when the seeing had improved somewhat.
Wayne J.
Do you know if any large aperture scopes have looked for a ‘scare’? Is HST working in any observations this week? Have you heard any rumors of anything faintly visible?
I haven’t heard of any of the professional scopes trying to see if there’s anything there. Since none of the amateur images have shown any signs of an impact, it’s unlikely that anyone will propose breaking into the schedule of the HST.
It’s not likely that a small impactor would leave a mark in the equatorial zone, due to the high cloud tops and convective flow in that region. Most likely it mostly burned up and the remnants consumed, just as happened in 2010 when Chris Go and Bird Wesley imaged a similar fireball.
I just learned that Glenn Orton (CalTech/JPL/NHRA/Etc.) has obtained time on NASA’s Infra-Red Telescope Facility (IRTF) to study Jupiter for signs of an impact from yesterday’s fireball. This 4.2m infra-red telescope should be able to peer deep into Jupiter’s cloud deck for any of the tell-tale signs of an impact.
Thank you very much for the update! It is wonderful that these days more and more observing programs seem to be building in some flexibility to respond to unexpected but interesting emergent events.
An images from Glenn Orton using the IRTF is posted on the Cosmic Diary blog of Franck Marchis. No scar visible in the near infrared:
No Detection of a Scar on Jupiter in the NIR