An Australian amateur astronomer named Bird (or, IRL, Anthony Wesley) just spotted something slamming into Jupiter – a collision that’s been confirmed by the big science guys at JPL and beyond. So, along with Discover Magazine and the rest, I’d like to salute the tiny black spot that wasn’t there before:
Bad Astronomy: People on Twitter (and on that site linked above) are speculating that this is the result of a large impact on Jupiter, similar to what happened in 1994 when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into the big planet.
Bird, on jupiter.samba.org :
By 1am I was ready to quit, and indeed I had hovered the mouse over the exit button on my capture application (Coriander for Linux) and then changed my mind and decided to carry on for another half hour or so. It was a very near thing.I’d noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region and was starting to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions also improved, I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.
My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also I’d noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with – this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.
It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new – I’d imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.
Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place – I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this new event.