Amateur Astronomers Catch Massive Jupiter Collision

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...

Comet Lovejoy Takes Trip Around The Sun, Lives To Tell About It

Growing up I always had this thought that if something got even remotely close to the Sun that it would just disintegrate into nothing. I mean, after all, the Sun’s surface is several million degrees.

That was not the case for a newly discovered comet named “Lovejoy”. Scientists tracked the two football field-sized comet as it traveled within 75,000 miles of the Suns surface to slingshot around it. Although the comet was only 10% the size it was before it’s encounter, it still survived only losing it’s tail.

Lovejoy isn’t expected to get that close to the Sun for another 800 to 900 years, so it has plenty of time to regain some of it’s mass and tail.