Jupiter’s latest collision with a comet or asteroid captured on camera

An asteroid or a comet has collided with the solar system’s largest planet Jupiter and the amazing event has been recorded by some intrepid star gazers. They have captured the planet’s latest collision on camera.

On March 17, amateur astronomer John McKeon was looking at the king of planets using telescope from Swords, Ireland, when he recorded the amazing time-lapse footage of something hitting Jupiter.

McKeon was capturing the transit of Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede through an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and his ASI120mm camera when something hit the planet.

In a YouTube video description, McKeon wrote, “The original purpose of the imaging session was to get this time-lapse, with a happy coincidence of the impact in the second, last capture of the night”.

Though, it is too early to reach over any conclusion on the Jupiter crash, NASA asteroid expert Paul Chodas, who is the head of the agency's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that it’s more likely that an asteroid and not comet was the culprit.

In a telephonic conversation, Chodas told Space.com that there are more chances that it was an asteroid simply because they are more commonly found.

According to Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait so far there was no clarity over what struck into Jupiter, but the impact was also recorded by at least one more amateur astronomer named Gerrit Kernbauer of Mödling, Austria.

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shared the YouTube video of the impact, recorded by Kernbauer. Plait said that the collision took place at 00:18 GMT, or just post midnight on March 17. Kernbauer recorded the Jupiter impact video, using a Skywatcher Newton 200/1000 Telescope.

In the video description, he wrote that the seeing wasn’t the best, thus, he hesitated to process the videos.