Hobby astronomer captures a rare moment in the video
The Brazilian José Luis Pereira had a rare recording on September 13, 2021. He was able to film an asteroid impact on the gas planet Jupiter.
Last Monday, at 1:39 a.m. Central European Summer Time, the amateur astronomer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash of light in the equatorial area of the largest planet in our solar system. He had expected good pictures because the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars were in opposition. Pereira regularly uses nights like this to take as many recordings as he can Space.com confirmed in a written message.
On Monday night, Pereira initially feared that the weather conditions would not be sufficient to get usable images of his favorite planet Jupiter. Still, he let his equipment go through. He recorded a total of 25 videos with a seamless sequence and fed them into the DeTeCt software before going to bed. DeTeCt is a software from the developer Marc Delcroix that evaluates video recordings of the planet Jupiter and examines them for clues for impacts. Confirmed impacts can then be found in this list again.
On the morning of September 14th, Pereira found the software confirmation for his observation. He sent it to Marc Delcroix, who is not only the developer of the software, but also the managing director of the French Astronomical Society (Société astronomique de France) is. Delcroix confirmed that his recording was indeed the documentation of an impact.
Then Pereira’s discovery made the rounds and reached the European Space Agency ESA, which even shared a photo of the impact on its Twitter account.
The ESA writes that there is not much information about the object that hit Jupiter. But it had to be either big and / or fast to create such a flash of light. According to the agency, thanks go to Jupiter for plugging in the impact.
With this, ESA is alluding to the great importance that Jupiter has as a planetary shield. Its size is accompanied by an immense attraction, and it is close to the asteroid belt of the Milky Way. He uses it to fish wandering asteroids like a magnet out of space before they can wreak havoc on other planets. After all, the gas giant suffers more than 15 impacts per year.
Hobby astronomer Pereira is happy. He has been trying persistently to capture such a moment for many years. If you want to know more about Pereira’s work, you should get his Flickr– and his Youtube channel visit with other materials.
