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And All Was Right With the World

Jupiter Just Took One For the Team, Meteorite Style

by Susana Polo | 4:13 pm, September 11th, 2012


When you look up at the sky tonight (or early tomorrow morning), see if you can find Jupiter. And if you can, give it a bit of a nod. A salute. A wave. Perhaps, extend your fist towards it, and imagine that it’s giving you a planetary fistbump right back, because if Jupiter could, it would. Instead, it’ll just have to keep using its enormous gravity well to attract dangerous extra-solar bodies like asteroids and comets, giving the inner solar system of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and yes, Earth, a bit shelter from what space, earth, and ancient life scientists understatedly call “impact events.”

You know, like it did yesterday morning, as picked up on by a handful of amateur astronomers.

Yesterday at 11:35:30 AM Universal Time (Oh, you didn’t know we had such a thing as Universal Time?), an amateur astronomer said he happend to be looking at Jupiter and observed a flash of “about 100 miles in diameter” on the surface of the planet. This information made its way, through the power of internet forums, to another amateur astronomer who happened to be filming Jupiter at the time. He went back through his footage and, sure enough, found the precise moment of impact:

Scientists and astronomers alike will be waiting to see whether Jupiter develops a dark mark near the area, which would confirm that this flash was the impact of a comet or asteroid dragged into Jupiter by the planet’s massive gravity. And it wouldn’t be the first time, or even unusual. Impact events on Jupiter have been recorded in 2009 and 2010, while the Shoemaker Levy-9 comet’s collide with the planet in 1994 made so much news I actually remember it, despite being barely eight years old at the time. And for good reason:

Astronomers suspect that giant Jupiter’s gravitational pull serves as a cosmic shield, sweeping up incoming objects that would have a deadlier effect if they were to slam into our planet. Some scientists say that without Jupiter, life on Earth wouldn’t have had much of a chance.

So don’t forget to give Jupiter a little credit tonight, as folks watch it for change in color that would indicate a large impact. It might just be one of the reasons we’re here at all.

(Cosmic Log via io9.)

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  • Klaus Hofmann
  • http://www.facebook.com/cgordonc Chris Gordon

    “Takes hit for the team” -
    incorrect and intentional propaganda, promoted at the expense of reality.
    Research has proved that Jupiter instead FLINGS ROCKS AT US. But that research
    is entirely suppressed by mogul controlled media in order to keep sheeple asleep
    with a faked sense of “safe.”

    This month’s Jupiter hit is the FOURTH in
    16 years. A HARBINGER of the asteroid storm sweeping through our solar system
    and surrounding our planet. All impacts on Earth are intentionally misreported
    by mogul media as “earthquakes” “tsunamis” “gas pipe
    blasts” “sink holes” `”terrorists explosions” etc. The
    rain of rocks flung at us by Jupiter is the single most censored and suppressed
    event in history.

    The
    reality of Jupiter’s threat to Earth is exposed online at:

    http://www.rockprophecy.com/rocknews.html#jupiterflingsatus

    NSA, Microsoft and NASA maintain cubical
    divisions to add propaganda “comments” to every post we make online
    to expose the insights rockprophecy.com

    We’re waiting for you to dismiss this with
    your accusations of delusional – a projection of your soon to be extinct
    fantasyland. Good ridence dominators – Earth will heal without your
    malignant civilization infestation.

  • Anonymous

    When’s the scifi book coming out? Sounds like a real page-turner!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1667485536 Kim Kahler
  • AnnaB

    Aw, and I was going to vote for Jupiter in this upcoming Planetarial Election. They’re all the same! They lie! And it’s the one with all the money who gets to pay for all the ads.

  • http://profiles.google.com/gnomer.denois Jill Oliver

    It’s a Gas Giant, you should have known it was in the pocket of Big Oil.

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