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Impact on Jupiter - Today


ReconRat

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Wow, cool pics. That was a substantial impact from the size of that fireball. My question would be how does an object big enough to make that large of a fireball not get noticed and tracked weeks or months before the actual impact?

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Wow, cool pics. That was a substantial impact from the size of that fireball. My question would be how does an object big enough to make that large of a fireball not get noticed and tracked weeks or months before the actual impact?

Probably was a dark object, like a common dirty asteroid. Not a comet or something that would leave a visible trail. Too small to have actually tracked from Earth with radar. Maybe quarter mile diameter? Or less?

Might still find it on deep space radar records if anything was pointed that direction lately. There's a lot of stuff out there, it's easy to miss something even like that with the results it had.

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btw, rough guess... if that had hit anywhere on Earth, most of us would be toast by now.

Damn! Thats one huge dent in Jupiter now, can they figure how big the fireball would have had to have been to be seen this far away? Surely there's a series of formula to convert that into mass?

:edit:

Io's 1.13 arc sec in diameter? What is an arc sec? Sorry, I'm a complete noob with astronomy.

Apparently they'll use the impact site to measure the estimated size of the object in the next few weeks?

Edited by Hellmutt
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Something to think about is Jupiters atmosphere. 1. it is thousands of miles deep and made of some flammable gasses 2. when an asteroid goes thru our thin atmosphere most burn up. So chances seem likely a fire ball would indicate a high velocity entry vector resulting in it flaming on entry and maybe igniting atmospheric gasses.

The large comet impacts years ago did not ignite gasses and instead caused atmospheric disturbances as they sank thru the gas giants outer layers. I've often heard two things about Jupiter. One it is a giant cleaner upper of asteroids and space debris and that it is a failed sun. It never reached mass to cause ignition of the trapped gasses.

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Ah Jupiter, the vacuum cleaner of the solar system. We owe our planet's continued existance to the countless objects Jupiter's enormous gravitational pull has sucked in...best wingman ever.

Smart, but yet funny post. Wingman comment gets +rep for making me chuckle. :D

Edited by NinjaNick
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Yeah....big asteroid hitting the Earth...

Unlike the movies, where something slowly burns it's way down to the ground and people run away screaming...

An incoming object could easily be doing mach 6 or greater, which would look more like a very wide laser beam shooting into the ground. The slow part, would be the shock wave traveling through the air, water, and ground coming toward your location. Yeah, slow... supersonic and capable of grinding up AND burning everything it hits.

Water in an ocean hit by something like that, would not only vaporize, it would burn. So the shock wave would move as a very hot flame front, even igniting the air itself. Only going out as it ran out of oxygen taken from the air, ground, and water.

The shock wave in the ground, like an earthquake, could be upwards of a 12 on the earthquake Richter scale. That would pulverize the ground and everything on the ground down to a depth of many feet, clear around the world. Twice or more.

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Yeah recon, I always saw that as a glaring inaccuracy in the disaster movies. If it were night time you would see either a dot getting bigger in a hurry or a very fast bright streak depending on your POV in relation to the origin and trajectory of the object. Daytime you'd have even less warning depending on the percieved proximity of the object to the sun. Either way you'd be fucked....propper fucked. I've seen some projections that show the earth actually bulging out at the point diametrically opposed to the point of impact depending on the size of the object.....

Damn, that's the most big words I've used in a single post I think....

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Minute of arc from Wikipedia

60 arcminute = 1 degree

60 arcsecond - 1 arcminute

so, 1 arc second = 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/360 of the full circle of the sky horizon.

or 4.8481368 µrad

English please? I'm an extremely out of practice ex-engineer, so my math skills have been reduced back to that of checkbook balances, micrometers, and tape measurement:D

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English please? I'm an extremely out of practice ex-engineer, so my math skills have been reduced back to that of checkbook balances, micrometers, and tape measurement:D

oh geez, I thought that was English and simplified...

ok, here... this is surprisingly accurate when you hold your hand out:

- Stretch your thumb and little finger as far from each other as you can. The span from tip to tip is about 25 degrees

- Do the same with your index finger and little finger. The span is 15 degrees

- Clench your fist at arms length, and hold it with the back of your hand facing you. The width is 10 degrees

- Hold your three middle fingers together; they span about 5 degrees

- The width of your little finger at arms length is 1 degree.

so an arc second would be 1/3600 of the width that little finger.

Or basically something we just can't see with the naked eye.

A good optical telescope in steady skies can resolve down to about 1″ (one arcsecond).

From One Minute Astronomer - Measuring The Sky

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oh geez, I thought that was English and simplified...

ok, here... this is surprisingly accurate when you hold your hand out:

- Stretch your thumb and little finger as far from each other as you can. The span from tip to tip is about 25 degrees

- Do the same with your index finger and little finger. The span is 15 degrees

- Clench your fist at arms length, and hold it with the back of your hand facing you. The width is 10 degrees

- Hold your three middle fingers together; they span about 5 degrees

- The width of your little finger at arms length is 1 degree.

so an arc second would be 1/3600 of the width that little finger.

Or basically something we just can't see with the naked eye.

A good optical telescope in steady skies can resolve down to about 1″ (one arcsecond).

From One Minute Astronomer - Measuring The Sky

Thanks man, that helps me wrap my head around it. Sometimes, layman's terms are still neccessary

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Wasn't the huge crater that killed the dinosaurs caused by a meteor around 50 yards wide? It was on National Geographic last night. 1/2 mile wide would hurt.

"The impactor had an estimated diameter of 10 km (6.2 mi) and delivered an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

Fucking Teratons, damn.

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