2 ms·
I wondered the same thing. 20 meters is about ~65 feet, just a little bit longer than a standard semi truck and trailer you might see out on the highway that’s
by MrWiffles 5y ago
I wondered the same thing. 20 meters is about ~65 feet, just a little bit longer than a standard semi truck and trailer you might see out on the highway that’s hauling say, groceries. So my first thought was, “what kind of material would be that combustible to impact something at Jupiter’s size and leave that big a flash lasting 2 whole seconds?”
Someone else commented about the size of the flash relative to Jupiter itself and my understanding of that persons comment was that the flash was about 10 times the diameter of the object give or take a little. So 20 meters made a ~200 meter visible explosion.
Now somebody correct me if I’m wrong here since I most likely am, but isn’t Jupiter a gas giant? Meaning what we saw either detonated before hitting the surface, or what we saw was only the light from the impact explosion that made it through the gas/atmosphere layer above it at the point of impact. If the latter, the actual visible yield would have been higher than what we saw, right?
- rbanffy 5y agoIn order to be visible, the flash must have happened above the top cloud layer. The surface is well below that - Jupiter is mostly atmosphere, with a little bit of extremely compressed planet in its middle.
- stan_rogers 5y ago"Combustible" doesn't matter. Nor, really, does "impact" in the sense of one objectively solid body striking another objectively solid body. Think Chelyabinsk - the actual "thing hitting the ground" impact was a relative nothingburger, and all of the excitement happened at altitude.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Meaning what we saw either detonated before hitting the surface Since last I heard the understanding waa Jupiter probably does not have a solid surface to hit at all, “before” should probably be “without”.