Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/09/something-big-smashed-into-jup.html
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If I recall the scale of Jupiter correctly (i.e. 4 Earths can fit inside the red dot), that explosion was the size of the moon.
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Thank goodness for the gas giants.
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How does something ‘smash into’ a cloud of gas?
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I feel like there is at least one fart joke in here somewhere.
Anyway, if the atmosphere is dense enough it can smash fairly large objects. Heat shields on rockets exist for a reason. A lot of the pieces of space rock that reach earth never make it to the ground. They explode or burn up in the sky (e.g. air, which is gas)
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Like my 1985 Pontiac Parisienne Safari, I guess Jupiter is a hard target to miss.
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Thanks Jupe for helping clean up
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Yeah, better Jupiter than Earth. We love you, Jupiter!
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Always wanted an astrophysicist to comment on how far the probability for life drops if in addition to the likelihood of an earth-like liquid-water planet one added in (say to The Drake equation) a requirement for a giant guardian planet(s) among the outer planets orbiting a star, (that is, in order to swallow up all the potential planet killing asteroid-like-things). Would that requirement make life oh-so-much more unlikely?
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Water is just a liquid, right? Tried diving from a some height, it feels like you hit something solid. Here we are talking about velocities of several tens of km per second so even gas will act more or less like a solid. The molecules just don’t have time to get out of the way like the do at slow velocities.
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Real fkn fast. That’s how.
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Sorry guys. That was just me playing with a laser pointer. My bad.
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Oblig:
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The black monolith orbiting Jupiter, and waiting for us, got depressed.
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From now on, I’m calling it ‘The Jupester’.
The Jupester’s on the job.
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I think life would still be likely - just not maybe super complex life. Cyanobacteria, archaea, etc.
I still think we will find something in Mars, just under the surface. Maybe even on the surface towards the poles. I’d also love it if we smashed some of rock formations and could see fresh stone that isn’t weathered. Or something different than the surface rocks. I mean on the moon we got lucky and found some different soil and stone types on the last mission (not total luck, we say down in an area we hoped would be more interesting, and trained the astronauts to think like geologists.)
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It was obviously texting while hurtling through the solar system. How else could something smash into such a large and visible planet?
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Sorry, not quite 4 Earths
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jupiter,_Earth_size_comparison.jpg
See also:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-spots-jupiter-s-great-red-spot
Measuring in at 10,159 miles (16,350 kilometers) in width (as of April 3, 2017) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth.
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Actually, in very high speed collisions, solids behave like liquids.
Plus, gases don’t have surface tension, which is what causes collision with water to be hard at relatively high speeds.
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