An Asteroid Collides With Jupiter

On July 19, 2009, thousands of amateurs were converging on China and thereabouts with just one astronomical thought in mind: seeing a total eclipse of the Sun three days later.

But the cosmos threw us all a curve that day, when Australian astrophotographer Anthony Wesley spied a dark smudge near Jupiter's south pole. Apparently something had slammed into the giant planet for the first time since Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's celebrated death plunge in 1994. Astronomers at several observatories dropped everything to try to record as much detail of the unexpected impact event as possible before the ashes faded from view.

It's taken a while, but two articles in this month's Icarus detail what infrared observers learned in the days and weeks following the impact. In one report, Leigh Fletcher (Oxford University) and others describe spectra obtained with the Gemini South telescope on July 24th, five days after the blast. Although the impact site looked dark to the eye, it glowed brightly in the infrared, indicating that stratospheric gases at the impact site were still slightly warm (by a few Kelvins).…

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Also see this Dome News item.