Something may have just struck Jupiter, and amateur astronomers captured images

boing
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This question has been asked and answered.

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Picture jumping off a really high diving board and belly-flopping in the water. Then picture it at thirty thousand miles per hour.

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What the flash really was…

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So we can see the impact on images and videos that show the entire planet.

Can you grasp the sheer scale of that event?

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At least we know it wasn’t from Europa.

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I have always been bothered by verbs like “crash” when the planet is mostly cloud.

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This does remind me of Terry Pratchett’s1 joke about the civilisation that was so clueless that when a large comet collided with a neighbouring planet they did absolutely nothing about it. The sour joke is that the US is proposing to spend what will end up as trillions “modernising” its nuclear weapons while not spending serious money on preventing something that would render the whole lot of them irrelevant.

Slightly OT, why is the previous comet referred to as Shoemaker-Levy when there were three discoverers, which is why at the time people were calling it Shoemaker-Shoemaker-Levy? Which of the Shoemakers is being written out of the history of science? /rant

1 I think it was Pratchett, though it’s the sort of thing DNA might have written.

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The Shuttle broke up in an atmosphere that was unbreathably thin. When you are going fast enough, hitting a near-vacuum is a crash. The three (or four, or five) states of matter we are familiar with are all pretty tenuous from the perspective of a neutron star, so choosing a collision with a solid only as being a crash is pretty arbitrary. (I don’t totally believe my own argument, I’m just being cranky this morning.)

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we could compromise on Shoesmaker-Levy (or Shoemakers-Levy?)

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Thunder “crashes” and that’s all cloud.

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sigh another intergalatic traveller becomes a sad statistic due to distracted driving.

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I agree, this will allow us all to tidily refer to this event as “When the Shoemakers-Levy Broke”

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Was it these guys?

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Aw, Dude, that was gross. Now how do I get this Great Red Spot out of my shirt?

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Probably trying to fix the AE-35 antenna unit so as to regain the ability to text while celestial navigating.

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At 35,000 miles per hour you can crash into “pure” air.

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I hope the Zoku were able to escape in time.

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“Solid” is relative. To be clear: everything is moving, it’s just that at our perceived speed, certain substances flow slowly enough that they seem static.

If you hit the “Clouds” of Jupiter at speed, you would literally skip off like you were hitting something a lot denser than concrete. Because those clouds are denser than concrete.

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This is the kind of question that makes me miss William Safire’s old column.

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No, No. We fold NASA into the Pentagon and make it black budget. That’s how politics really works.

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