Ouch! Jupiter Just Got Smacked By an Unidentified Celestial Object

Passant Rabie
Fri, September 1, 2023 

Jupiter’s south pole as captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is not one to play with. That doesn’t stop wandering comets or asteroids from testing the gas giant, occasionally crashing into Jupiter due to its enormous size and immense gravitational pull.

An amateur astronomer caught a brief impact on Jupiter this week, appearing as a bright burst of light left behind by a small object.

The last recorded impact took place in September 2021, in which the object was of similar size to this recent one. But perhaps the most famous impact event took place in 1994 when fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet collided with Jupiter with the force of 300 million atomic bombs, according to NASA.


This composite is assembled from separate images of Jupiter and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 1994.

Luckily, Jupiter can shake these collisions off. If a similar sized object were to impact Earth, our planet would suffer a lot more damage.

Jupiter may actually play a role in protecting Earth, and the rest of the inner solar system planets, from these types of impacts. The planet either takes on objects that come near the solar system itself, or flings them further out away from Earth. The solar system’s gas giant certainly knows how to keep the peace in its cosmic neighborhood.