[meteorite-list] Mysterious Flash on Jupiter Left No Debris Cloud

From: Chris Peterson <clp_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:33:51 -0600
Message-ID: <085DD3FC79904D63A1F780E181FEFD58_at_bellatrix>

I find it odd that anybody thinks it strange this event didn't produce a
visible mark. We have two cases of blotches on Jupiter- one from SL9, known
to be huge, and the other from something nobody ever saw. There must be
meteors all the time on Jupiter, and most, like on Earth, should simply burn
up before the atmosphere gets dense and leave no trace. This latest event
happened to be big enough to get seen as a tiny flash on a lucky image, but
it's pretty clearly in a very different class than the last two known
impacts. If we always had cameras on Jupiter, we'd probably find that events
like this are fairly common. It's the one big enough to effect the denser,
lower clouds that are rare.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message -----
From: <bernd.pauli at paulinet.de>
To: <Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 3:07 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Mysterious Flash on Jupiter Left No Debris Cloud


> Hmmm?!? So, what pelted Jupiter's atmosphere without leaving a cloud of
> debris?
> Something "rock solid" ... so solid (a high-nickel ataxite?) that it did
> not dis-
> integrate like IIAB Sikhote-Alin did (thinking of Medvedev's famous
> painting!)?
> Did it plunge through Jupiter's very dense (!) atmosphere (almost)
> vertically
> without disintegrating?
>
> Mulling here in Germany,
>
> Bernd
Received on Wed 16 Jun 2010 07:33:51 PM PDT