It would appear so. We see it in a …
Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiters South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact – either an asteroid or comet – similar to the Shoemaker-Ley impacts in 1994.
This is on Anthony Wesley’s web site, and what appears to be the outcome of an impact event has been photographed by him.
A bit of his post reads:
I started this imaging session on Jupiter at approximately 11pm local time (1300UTC). The weather prediction was not promising, clear skies but a strong jetstream overhead according to the Bureau of Met. The temperature was also unusually high for this time of year (winter), also a bad sign.
The scope in use was my new 14.5″ newtonian, in use now for a few weeks and so far returning excellent images.
I was pleasantly surprised to find reasonable imaging conditions and so I decided to continue recording data until maybe 1am local time. By about midnight (12:10 am) the seeing had deteriorated and I was ready to quit. Indeed I had hovered the mouse over the exit button on my capture application (Coriander for Linux) and then changed my mind and decided instead to simply take a break for 30 minutes and then check back to see if the conditions had improved. It was a very near thing.
When I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.
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NASA has confirmed that it’s an impact.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/jup-20090720.html
NASA has confirmed that it’s an impact.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/jup-20090720.html
I saw this, too. Cool or what? I read somewhere that an amateur alerted the “big boys” about the hit and they, inturn, focused the infrared scopes at it. Maybe it will make the NASA picture of the day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
It was confirmed yesterday by near IR imaging, JPL using IRTF and UC using Keck.
I blogged the confirmation yesterday and the original the day before and the confirmation images are in the entry in the physical science channel right there on the sb front page.