Last year’s Jupiter collision was probably an asteroid
JUN 08, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024399
BBC : On 19 July 2009, amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley pointed his 14.5-inch telescope at Jupiter and noticed a new feature on the gas giant’s southern limb: a black spot whose angular size corresponded to a region the size of the Pacific Ocean. Fragments of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 produced similar-looking patches when they struck Jupiter in 2004. Based on that resemblance and an analysis of the 2009 images, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega of the University of País Vasco in Bilbao, Spain, and his collaborators have concluded that last July’s impactor was most probably an icy body with a size of 0.5–1 km—that is, an asteroid.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
