Saturday, July 25, 2009

Huge Comet Impacts Jupiter: Leaves a Scar

Fifteen years after Jupiter was pummelled by fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the planet has been struck again, this time by an unseen object estimated to span several football fields. An amateur astronomer in Australia snapped the first pictures of the new bruise, and astronomers at larger telescopes later confirmed the feature was created by an impact.

Check-out operations on the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope were interrupted to capture this image – the sharpest visible-light picture yet taken of the of the impact site – on Thursday. Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere has made the impact's debris plume lumpy. (Image: NASA/ESA/H. Hammel/Space Science Institute/Jupiter Impact Team)

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