Eyes on the skies: What hit Jupiter?

Astronomers in the Bay Area and around the world are all agog over an immense scar larger than the Pacific Ocean that has suddenly appeared on the surface of Jupiter.

Some unknown comet or asteroid must have just crashed into the giant planet’s upper atmosphere to cause the scar, the astronomers believe.

For only the second time in the 400 years since Galileo trained his primitive telescope on Jupiter, professionals and amateurs alike are observing how the planet has been blasted by a cosmic collision, and excitement is mounting about the mystery.

The only similar impact occurred 15 years ago, when huge chunks of Comet Shoemaker-Levy rained down on the planet at interplanetary speeds for five days and pitted the gaseous surface with clusters of huge black spots.

That crash has intrigued astronomers ever since, and they have been hard at work analyzing its effects on the planet in scientific paper after paper.

The new scar was first detected Sunday by Anthony Wesley, an amateur astronomer in Australia, who promptly posted a blog for other astronomers.

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Venus and Jupiter To Form Triangle ‘Capstone’ With Moon

Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets, have been marching toward each other for more than a month in the southwestern sky at dusk. As they’ve drawn closer together, the sight has been catching more people’s eyes, and now the show is reaching its climax.

This evening, weather permitting, you will see Venus and Jupiter blazing about a finger’s width apart at arm’s length. Look early enough and, far to their lower right, you can find the crescent moon just above the horizon.

Tomorrow evening, the two planets will be slightly closer together, and the moon will be hanging higher and nearer them.

Monday night brings the peak of the show. The two planets will remain as close as ever, and the moon will form a compact, extraordinary triangle with them.

Then on subsequent evenings, things fall apart. The moon will move farther off to the upper left, and Jupiter starts pulling away to Venus’s right.

Although the three objects look close together, looks are deceiving. The moon is 252,000 miles away. Venus is currently 370 times farther than the moon, at 94 million miles. And Jupiter, at 540 million miles, is nearly six times as far away as Venus.

To put it another way: The moon is currently 1.4 light-seconds distant, Venus is 8.4 light-minutes distant, and Jupiter is 42 light-minutes away. That’s how long the light from each has been traveling through space before it hits your eye.

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Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky

It’s not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.

In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it’s made of.

Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.

But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn’t been one before.

Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.

Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.

Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn’t get signatures for any known elements.

“Because we can’t see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can’t tell if it’s even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy,” Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.

It’s not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.

All the scientists know is that it’s no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.

As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, “that leaves a lot of leeway.”

“We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar,” Barbary told New Scientist, “or might be able to shed some light on it.”

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