War on Jupiter ?

Is there a war on Jupiter ? Well, on August 20th, for the third time in about a year, a fireball was spotted above Jupiter’s atmosphere. Astronomers believe that this was caused by a small meteoroid that burned up entirely in Jupiter’s upper cloud deck. Jupiter’s fireballs were thought to be a rare event, but the three recent ones have proved otherwise. The brightness and duration of the flash were estimated to be roughly 8 to 13 meters across. Astronomers do not know the population of these fireballs up there on the Solar System, and as Amy Simon-Miller who is chief of the Planetary Systems Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland said, " ...and we will never pick them up in sky surveys, because they are just to small to see before they impact." So, this is where the amateur astronomers kick in. They are relied on to monitor Jupiter because professional telescopes just happen to not be able to do those types of things. In addition, most of the cameras on those large telescopes were not designed to take videos, so it makes it even more difficult to catch one of those fireballs. However, catching the Jupiter flash seemed not to difficult for Masayuki Tachikawa, an astronomy hobbyist of Japan. Within hours after he posted his up online, a second Japanese sky- watcher realized that he had initially recorded the same flash. They both had used nothing more than just a webcam attached to their backyard telescope. " Most amateurs are now taking high resolution, digital videos, whereas in the past they used to just take photographs and make sketches," said Simon-Miller.

This third fireball that was spotted above Jupiter’s atmosphere has definitely made scientists get more involved with this topic. They are now beginning to build a census of objects in Jupiter’s crossing orbits, which they had underestimated. Then, by observing this on Jupiter, they can also begin to understand more about the Earth crossing objects, and this information will increase their knowledge about the potential dangerous bodies, and also have more knowledge about the way things work in the Solar System.

This is an important piece of information because it has to do with our Solar System. It is important to know what goes up there, because those things might be affecting us down here on Earth. Also, since now astronomers and scientists are becoming more aware of these bodies, they will have more knowledge and information about it, and will be able to protect us better from these bodies if one day they are to approach near Earth. All these things are happening in our Solar System and it is important to know how these things are happening and why they are happening, because after all, we are living on Earth, which is part of the Solar System.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100824-jupiter-fireballs-impacts-meteors-comets-space-science/