Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Amateur Astronomer Spots Asteroid Hit on Jupiter


Something extremely large slammed into Jupiter on July 19th. The impact, which was the size of the Earth, was discovered by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, a 44 year old computer programmer in Murrumbateman, north of Canberra in Australia, using his 14.5 inch reflecting telescope.

NASA's JPL has confirmed the discovery which will only remain visible for a few more days.

The discovery of the impact was extremely lucky. Lucky in that someone had to be looking at the right time, right hour and have the right side facing toward us.

Needless to say the find has stunned the astronomy world since this was actually the first impact seen by astronomers since a comet collided with Jupiter in July of 94.

The bright white dot in the lower left of the photo is the object's impact

Complete story from Yahoo news submitted by Tim Sayell

No comments: