Just when you think our tiny Solar System is at peace, news of rogue comets or ginormous asteroids hitting a nearby planet wipe all those thoughts away. Amateur astronomer Dan Peterson reported that he had captured a collision on Jupiter while doing routine observations the morning of September 10th. Dan Hall, another amateur astronomer who happen to be imaging the planet, posted this video on Flickr (seen above) showing the fiery impact.
I'm not a scientist nor a mathematician, but just mixing together a few Google image searches with a screen capture of the video leads me to believe that if we had a collision like this on Earth we would be adding ourselves to the fossil collections with the dinosaurs.
Someone tell me, is the below image pretty accurate? If it is we all owe Jupiter a huge thank you...
An asteroid some 1,300 wide, code named 2005 YU55, will come just slightly closer than the moon’s orbit on November 8th.
The encounter is being called safe and scientists say they “fully understand the asteroids trajectory”. NASA, who will be tracking 2005 YU55 with the Deep Space Network antenna starting November 4th, say the asteroid will not have any gravitational influence on Earth -meaning our tides and tectonic plates will be fine.
The trajectory of asteroid 2005 YU55 is well understood. At the point of closest approach, it will be no closer than 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers) or 0.85 the distance from the moon to Earth. The gravitational influence of the asteroid will have no detectable effect on anything here on Earth, including our planet’s tides or tectonic plates. Although 2005 YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity of Earth (and Venus and Mars), the 2011 encounter with Earth is the closest this space rock has come for at least the last 200 years.
