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A color composite image of the June 3, 2010, Jupiter impact flash. Credit: Anthony Wesley observing from Broken Hill, Australia. In a paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group of professional and amateur astronomers announced that Jupiter is getting hit surprisingly often by small asteroids, lighting up the giant planet's atmosphere with frequent fireballs. "Jupiter is a big gravitational vacuum cleaner," said co-author and JPL astronomer Glenn Orton. "It is clear now that relatively small objects left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago still hit Jupiter frequently." The impacts are...

Without warning, a mystery object struck Jupiter on July 19, 2009, leaving a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The spot first caught the eye of an amateur astronomer in Australia, and soon, observatories around the world, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, were zeroing in on the unexpected blemish. Astronomers had witnessed this kind of cosmic event before. Similar scars had been left behind during the course of a week in July 1994, when more than 20 pieces of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The 2009 impact occurred during the same week, 15 years later....

In breaking news, Anthony Wesley reports another impact on Jupiter, this morning. In his words: ".. at approximately 20:30utc this morning I recorded a large fireball on Jupiter, it lasted a couple of seconds and was very bright.This was a large fireball, but it doesn't seem to have left any mark, probably all gone in the upper atmosphere before it reached the clouds."His preliminary image (a raw frame from the video) is shown below. The fireball can be seen in the upper left of frame. A video and more details will follow soon.Stay tuned to IceInSpace for more, and for...

Amateur sightings prompt call for a network of backyard astronomers.On August 20, for the third time in about a year, amateur astronomers spotted a fireball above Jupiter's atmosphere. The discovery suggests the planet gets walloped more often than previously thought, say astronomers, some of whom are calling for a global "volunteer army" of backyard Jupiter watchers. The recent flash follows on the heels of July 2009 and June 2010 fireballs over the gas giant planet. (See "Bright Fireball Slams Into Jupiter" [June 2010] and "Jupiter Impact Creates Huge New Spot" [July 2009].) Astronomers speculate that the August 20 flash was...

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth,...

Crater patterns on Vesta and Ceres could help pinpoint when Jupiter began to form during the evolution of the early Solar System. A study modelling the cratering history of the largest two objects in the asteroid belt, which are believed to be among the oldest in the Solar System, indicates that the type and distribution of craters would show marked changes at different stages of Jupiter’s development. Results will be presented by Dr Diego Turrini at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, on Monday 14 September. The study, carried out by scientists at the Italian National Institute for...

Hubble has trained its new camera on the atmospheric disturbance on Jupiter believed to have been caused by a comet or asteroid impact. The telescope used the Wide Field Camera 3 fitted on the recent shuttle servicing mission to capture ultra-sharp visible-light images of the scar. The dark spot near the gas giant's southern pole was noticed first by an amateur Australian astronomer.

PASADENA, California — A large comet or asteroid has slammed into Jupiter, creating an impact site the size of Earth, pictures by an Australian amateur astronomer show. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery using its large infrared telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, said computer programer Anthony Wesley, 44, who discovered the impact zone while stargazing at home. News of Wesley's find on a backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope has stunned the astronomy world, with scientists saying the impact will last only days more. Wesley said it took him 30 minutes to realize a dark spot rotating...

Without Jupiter acting as a "cosmic vacuum cleaner" sucking up these dangerous objects, there would be so many catastrophic impacts that life probably wouldn't have evolved on the Earth and we wouldn't be here today... "This vacuum cleaner idea goes back to when the long-period comets coming in from the Oort Cloud were viewed as being the only significant impact risk," says Horner. "In the 1950s there were only one or two near-Earth asteroids known, so they were viewed as oddities." ...Since the 1950s, scientists have discovered more objects in the solar system, and they say many of them could...

Jupiter increases risk of comet strike on Earth 11:53 24 August 2007 NewScientist.com news service David Shiga Earth experienced an especially heavy bombardment of asteroids and comets early in the solar system's history (Illustration: Julian Baum) Contrary to prevailing wisdom, Jupiter does not protect Earth from comet strikes. In fact, Earth would suffer fewer impacts without the influence of Jupiter's gravity, a new study says. It could have implications for determining which solar systems are most hospitable to life. A 1994 study showed that replacing Jupiter with a much smaller planet like Uranus or Neptune would lead to 1000 times...

Iran has confirmed that a meteor has hit somewhere in the northern part of the country. The meteor landed in Avaj in the province of Qazvin, Mohammad Ali Ahani, director of Qazvin Crisis Management Staff said, Mehr news agency reported July 31. Also, there have been reports that some pieces of rock have hit areas in Eshtehard, Alborz Province, Arsalan Qasemi, governor of Boeen Zahra, county in Qazvin Province, said. Another local governor of Takestan County, Qazvin Province, said that the area witnessed the passing of the meteor, but nowhere in the district under his supervision had been hit.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in England 1014 AD, on the eve of St. Michael’s day (September 28, 1014) “came the great sea-flood, which spread wide over this land, and ran so far up as it never did before, overwhelming many towns, and an innumerable multitude of people.” This is clearly a reference to a tsunami similar to the one that struck Indonesia in December 2004 which killed over 250,000 people. What could have caused this tsunami? Could a meteor or comet impact in the Atlantic Ocean have been the cause? Researcher Dallas Abbott of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory...

The Sun, Fox News and others are reporting that a group of Chinese and Turkish Christians claim to have found the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat about 13,000 ft up.

Double impact may have caused tsunami, global cooling Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters. Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria (see map) revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) wide....

Multiple comet impacts around 1500 years ago triggered a "dry fog" that plunged half the world into famine. Historical records tell us that from the beginning of March 536 AD, a fog of dust blanketed the atmosphere for 18 months. During this time, "the sun gave no more light than the moon", global temperatures plummeted and crops failed, says Dallas Abbott of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York... Now Abbott and her team have found the first direct evidence that multiple impacts caused the haze. They found tiny balls of condensed rock vapour or "spherules" in debris inside...

A meteorite impact off Long Island 2,300 years ago may have set off a huge tsunami that flooded the New York City region, a new study says (New York City and Long Island map). It's not known whether any ancient settlements were in the path of the proposed killer waves, but "any significant tsunami today would be devastating and likely to flood places like lower Manhattan," Vanderbilt University geologist Steven Goodbred said. Tsunamis are typically triggered by seismic events. An undersea earthquake, for example, caused the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But meteorite strikes have also been known to spark...

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?The universal human myth may be the first example of disaster reporting. by Scott Carney11-15-2007 The Fenambosy chevrons at the tip of Madagascar. Image courtesy of Dallas Abbott The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a...

Dallas Abbott The Fenambosy chevron, one of four near the tip of Madagascar, is 600 feet high and three miles from the ocean. At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. snip... The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet,...

Did a planetary wobble kill the dinosaurs? by Nicola JonesNew ScientistJune 27 2001Bruce Runnegar from the University of California at Los Angeles' Center for Astrobiology... and his colleagues used computer models to map out the Solar System for the past 250 million years. In particular, they looked at the perihelion of each planet - the point in its orbit where it is closest to the Sun. The perihelion of Earth rotates around the Sun with a period of hundreds of thousands of years. Because of subtle tugs and pulls between the planets, this period changes slightly with time... Their...

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