A Fireball Whacked Into Jupiter, and Astronomers Got It on Video

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/science/jupiter-comet-flashes.html

By Katrina Miller, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Kyoto University in Japan, received an intriguing email... An amateur astronomer in his country had spotted a bright flash in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Dr. Arimatsu, who runs an observation program to study the outer solar system using backyard astronomy equipment, put out a call for more information. Six more reports of the Aug. 28 flash — which, according to Dr. Arimatsu, is one of the brightest ever recorded on the giant gas planet — came in from Japanese skywatchers. Flashes like these are caused by asteroids or comets from the edges of our solar system that impact Jupiter’s atmosphere. “Direct observation of these bodies is virtually impossible, ...,” Dr. Arimatsu wrote.... But Jupiter’s gravity lures in these objects, which eventually slam into the planet, “making it a unique and invaluable tool for studying them directly,” he said. ...In 1994, one comet whacked into Jupiter with so much force that it left a visible debris field. Astronomers saw another massive impact in 2009. Most collisions with Jupiter, the solar system’s fifth planet, are witnessed opportunistically by amateur astronomers. (Eight of the nine flashes seen on Jupiter since 2010 were reported by amateurs, according to Dr. Arimatsu.) Typically they use a technique called lucky imaging, which takes a video of a portion of the sky at a high frame rate. ...the flash reported in August had an impact comparable to the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which experts believe was an asteroid that ripped apart 800 square miles of forest. This is the second Jupiter event observed in the past decade with this much energy, said Dr. Arimatsu, who reported the last one in 2021, with an estimated energy equivalent to two megatons of TNT.... 

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