Fifteen years after being battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy, Jupiter has drawn the fire of another renegade body.
A dark scar near the planet's southern polar region, first noticed by an amateur astronomer in Australia, is believed to have been caused by a comet crashing into the giant planet.
Infrared images taken by a NASA telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, show a dark scar-like patch and a bright shower of debris particles in the planet's upper atmosphere. The impact site also shows a warming in the planet's troposphere, and possibly higher levels of ammonia gas.
"On Friday night I was imaging the same area that I was imaging Sunday night so I could tell pretty quickly when I saw this black mark coming into view that it was something that wasn't there when I last looked two days before," said amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who discovered the crash site on July 19 from outside his home observatory near Murrumbateman NSW Australia.
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