PHYSICS PROJECT

-Partheev Naraayan T G
XI – B1
AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS CAPTURE FLASH FROM
ASTEROID IMPACTING JUPITER
the latest event is the seventh time in history that observers have recorded an impact flash on Jupiter.
Information about this incident:
◦ Five amateur astronomers from South America and Europe have captured a burst of light on Jupiter that was
the result of an asteroid crashing into the planet’s atmosphere. It is thought that the flash on 13 September –
known as a meteor “bolide” – may have been created by a body tens of metres across. It is only the seventh
time in history that observers have recorded an impact flash on the gas giant.
◦ José Luis Pereira from Brazil is among those to image the impact. On the evening of the 13 September he was
recording videos of the planet with a 275 mm-aperture Newtonian telescope when he spotted a “glow” in one
of the captures. “At the time I didn’t give it much importance because I thought it was something related to
the capture parameters due to bad weather conditions,” he told Physics World.
◦ Pereira nevertheless ran the data through software that is designed to look for impact flashes on Jupiter,
which alerted him to a possible event in one of the videos. Pereira subsequently got in touch with fellow
amateur astronomer Marc Delcroix, who leads the development of the DeTeCt program, who was able to
confirm his finding. “I was extremely emotional as it’s something I’ve wanted to discover for many years,”
says Pereira. “It doesn’t even feel like it’s real.”
Impact zone:

◦ Delcroix adds that as well as the five observers who independently discovered the impact, another
four also uncovered signs of it in their data after news of the event got out. The detection of the
bolide on the Solar System’s largest planet highlights the growing success of regular, international,
observing campaigns by amateur astronomers. It also marks the second time that DeTeCt has been
involved in identifying a fireball on Jupiter – the other being the discovery, by a US-based
astronomer, of an impact flash in 2019.
◦ Delcroix says some 140 observers currently send him their results from using DeTeCt, with the
number of users growing appreciably after this latest event. “My hope is to have a more
generalised usage of DeTeCt to maximise the number of impacts detected and get a more robust
impact frequency estimation on Jupiter,” he says.