An object recently hit Jupiter and there is amateur footage of it. Think about how large that impact must have been, considering that we can actually see a visible disturbance to the planet! It’s my understanding is that the gravity of Jupiter is about 2.4 times that of earth. In other words, 100 pounds on Earth is the equivalent to 240 pounds on Jupiter.
In a piece by Phil Plait, he says the following:
On average (and ignoring orbital velocity), an object will hit Jupiter with roughly five times the velocity it hits Earth, so the impact energy is 25 times as high.
The asteroid that burned up over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was 19 meters across, and it exploded with the energy of 500,000 tons of TNT. Now multiply that by 25, and you can see how it doesn’t take all that big a rock to hit Jupiter for us to be able to see it from Earth.
If you multiply that by 25 you get 12,500,000 tons of TNT!!! Hard to even fathom. Also, there’s definitely a “Yo Mama” joke here somewhere…
