Impact Reports

Both positive detections and negative detections are important. Positive detections of impacts require swift communication that an impact has happened. Negative detections are usefull to understand the flux of objects that impact Jupiter.

Positive detections:

Please report your possible impact detections to Ricardo Hueso, Marc Delcroix, and Imke de Pater, as well as your collaborators and astronomical forums. A quick new of an impact is crucial as it may help other observers to realize they may have observed the same impact and may trigger Jupiter observations on large telescopes.

Follow-up observations: There have been many programs to run Jupiter observations with the Hubble Space Telescope in case of an exceptionally bright flash event on Jupiter. Images on the right show HST follow-up observations after the first flash event on Jupiter acquired with HST 77 hrs after the impact. HST did not observe any debris field in the planet after this impact confirming the small size of the object hitting the planet. However, after an exceptional object hitting Jupiter a dark debris field can be formed on the planet and observed with amateur telescopes as it happened in June 1994 and July 2009 after the impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the "Bird impact" discovered by Anthony Wesley. Observations in the visible may show a dark spot on Jupiter. Observations in methane band may show a bright feature. For any impact in Jupiter observations in methane band acquired by amateur astronomers on the same and next Jupiter rotation can be crucial to help and decide if a follow-up observation with a large telescope will produce a follow-up of the meteor debris field released on Jupiter's atmosphere. Currently no "flash event" has shown a debris field on the planet but impacts with objects 5 times bigger in size and 100 bigger in mass might produce detectable features in Jupiter using Hubble.

Negative detections:

Unfortunately the probability of finding an impact in Jupiter isvery low for an individual observer. To detect a single flash may require examining hundreds of hours of video observations. However negative detections are also important and the DeTeCt software will produce detailed reports of the analysis of your observations. Please sent these reports to Marc Delcroix for the statistical analysis of non-detections and an updated estimation of the minimum flux rate of impacts in Jupiter on his impact analysis website. With a bit of luck you may find the next bolide on Jupiter. With less luck you will help to constrain the current rate of small size impacts on Jupiter which will help scientist to explore the number of small bodies on the outer portions of the Solar System and to improve our understanding of Jupiter formation and evolution and its collisional history.

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Last updated: 23 Feb. 2018