Hit It With the Flash Again

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Jupiter just got smacked by a space stone and an amateur astronomer caught information technology on camera

Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured this shot of an impactor (bright flash at center-left) hitting Jupiter on Sept. xiii, 2021. (Epitome credit: José Luis Pereira)

Jupiter got whacked again.

Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash on the solar system'due south largest planet Monday night (Sept. 13), memorializing the fiery death of a infinite stone loftier in the Jovian atmosphere.

"I am an assiduous planetary observer," Pereira told Infinite.com in a written statement Tuesday (Sept. 14). "When the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are in opposition, I try to make images in every possible dark of clear skies. Particularly [of] the planet Jupiter, my favorite."

Related: Juno spacecraft's astonishing views of Jupiter (photos)
More: The best telescopes of 2021 for beginners and viewing planets

On Sunday (Sept. 12) and Monday, Pereira ready his equipment in São Caetano do Sul, in the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Equally on many other nights, he aimed to photograph Jupiter and capture videos for the DeTeCt program, which seeks to spot and characterize impacts on the behemothic planet.

The weather didn't look similar information technology would cooperate on Monday dark, but Pereira persevered, collecting a series of 25 Jupiter videos, with no time gap between them.

"To my surprise, in the first video I noticed a dissimilar glow on the planet, but I didn't pay much attention to it as I idea it might exist something related to the parameters adopted, and I continued watching normally," Pereira wrote. "And then as not to stop the captures in progress for fearfulness that weather condition weather would worsen, I didn't bank check the start video."

He fed the videos into the DeTeCt program and so went to bed.

"I checked the outcome only on the morn of the 14th, when the program alerted me to the high probability of bear on and verified that there was indeed a record in the kickoff video of the night," Pereira wrote.

He then sent the information to Marc Delcroix of the French Astronomical Guild, who confirmed that Pereira had indeed recorded footage of an affect that occurred Mon at 6:39 p.m. EDT (2239 GMT).

"For me it was a moment of neat emotion, as I have been looking for a record of [such an] event for many years," Pereira wrote.

His observing setup consists of the following, he added: a Newtonian Telescope 275mm f/five,3 with a QHY5III462C photographic camera, plus a Televue Powermate 5x (f/26,5) eyepiece and an IRUV cut filter. If you're looking to learn more most how to photograph planets, bank check out our astrophotography for beginners guide for the basics. You tin as well come across how the Nikon Z6 camera stacks up for astrophotography hither.

You can run across more than of Pereira's astronomical work on Flickr and YouTube.

A big, frequently battered planet

Because information technology orbits close to the main asteroid belt and features a powerful gravitational pull, Jupiter gets pummeled fairly often. In July 1994, for example, fragments of the cleaved-autonomously Comet Shoemaker-Levy nine famously slammed into Jupiter, creating big bruises in the planet's thick atmosphere that lasted for months.

Those scars opened a rare window into Jupiter below the cloud tops, and professional person astronomers took reward of the opportunity. They studied the impact sites with a variety of powerful telescopes, fleshing out our agreement of the gas giant's atmospheric composition.

Some other high-profile smashup occurred xv years later, when an impactor punched a scar the size of the Pacific Body of water into Jupiter's swirling air. Like the Shoemaker-Levy nine lesions, that blemish lingered long enough for professional astronomers to mobilize.

But it doesn't look similar they'll get that gamble with the newly observed impact.

"The site is clearly resolved and no visible scar was left (just every bit with previous impact flash events.) The object was probably too pocket-size to reach the deeper atmosphere," astrophotographer Damian Peach wrote on Twitter Wednesday, where he posted a gorgeous photo of a healed-upwards Jupiter taken an hour afterwards it was striking.

Mike Wall is the writer of " Out In that location " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated past Karl Tate), a book about the search for conflicting life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow u.s.a. on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Infinite Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and armed forces space, but has been known to fiddle in the space art beat. His volume nigh the search for conflicting life, "Out In that location," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked every bit a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a available'south degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you lot tin can follow Michael on Twitter.

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Source: https://www.space.com/jupiter-impact-flash-photo-video

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