On August 7, 2019, Ethan Chappel recorded a 1.5-second flash in Jupiter's atmosphere with his telescope in his backyard in Texas. He captured a flash that seems to be the Earth's size which matched the brightness of one of Jupiter's moons, lo.
Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), headed by Ramanakumar Sankar and Csaba Palotai, conducted an analysis on the data. Accordingly, the estimate of the flash could have been caused by a stony-iron asteroid. The data further shows that the said asteroid is between 39 to 52 feet or 12 to 16 meters in diameter. Comparatively, this asteroid could be about the size of a large bus.
The footage also shows that the flare could have been from a relatively small asteroid. However, this asteroid has an estimated mass [of about 450 tons. The released mass, on the other hand, created an explosion of 240 kilotons in equivalent to TNT when it smashed into Jupiter's upper atmosphere. The smash was estimated to be more or less 50 miles or 80 kilometers above the clouds of Jupiter.
This analysis was presented to the European Planetary Society Congress in Geneva at the 2019 Joint Meeting from September 15 to 20, 2019. The joint meeting was attended by over 1,500 planetary scientists from across the Globe. More than 1,950 abstracts were submitted for discussion and analysis. The Congress aims to promote the advancement of planetary science and other related industries among individuals and corporate members.
The presentation on Jupiter's impact was produced by a software known as DeTeCt that provided the analysis of the observations captured by Chappel. The software was programmed with high precision that identified and highlighted the location of the impact. The captured video lasted for about 1.5 seconds but the captured speed was 83 frames per second. The captured flash also showed the structure of the impact --it lightens, then it decays, and it brightens once again. These are the signatures of impact fragmentation of the seemingly "asteroidal" object that hit the planet's atmosphere. According to Marc Delcroix, a French astronomer, this impact flash on Jupiter was the first captured using the DeTeCt software. He said that those flashes are extremely rare as impact flashes are usually faint which could be easily missed even if you observe the planet for hours. But with DeTeCt, when the flash is captured in a video recording, it will be easier to analyze and quantify the energy required to make the flash visible even at a distance of 700 million kilometers. Previous activities on Jupiter's atmosphere remain unnoticed and unspotted, however, with DeTeCt, an estimate of 20 to 0 similar impacts on Jupiter's surface were caught each year. DeTeCt is an open-source software developed by Ricardo Hueso and his team at the University of the Basque County in Spain. This is specially designed to identify and observe any impact on the solar system's largest planet. Now, scientists can DeTeCt flash impacts on Jupiter! Isn't that space-mazing?
