Monday, July 20, 2009

Gas Giant Smackdown!

A rogue object has collided with Jupiter!

Wasn't this how Greg Bear's Forge of God started? Should we start saying goodbye to our loved ones now?

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4 Comments:

Blogger Ken Houghton said...

"We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event," said Glenn Orton, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. "We couldn't have planned it better."

When Someone wants you to see something, they time it that way. This is simply G-d (or the Advanced Alien Race that has been Watching) saying, "Hey, it's been forty years since the Moon landing and you've done squat since. Time to start over."

8:10 AM  
Blogger Ralf the Dog said...

We only see the things we can see. This could happen every Tuesday on Jupiter on the wrong side of the planet when we don't have a probe looking.

12:46 PM  
Blogger Dave Bishop said...

I'm just glad that it wasn't 'Third Rocky Planet from the Sun Smackdown'!

Isn't this what Jupiter is supposed to be 'for' - hoovering up the chunkier bits before they can reach us?

12:46 PM  
Blogger Dave Bishop said...

One thing that occurred to me, as I was drifting off to sleep last night, was that there appeared to be only one impact site. I seem to recall that the Shoemaker-Levy comet, that hit Jupiter in the 1990s, was first ripped apart by the planet's gravitational field, resulting in several impact sites.
So whatever it was, it probably had greater tensile strength than a comet (i.e. than a 'dirty snowball').

5:14 AM  

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