Rogue Asteroid Impacted Jupiter






"The object that hit Jupiter this time would have been small, dark, and cold—in other words, hard for us to see before the impact, regardless of which wavelength we used for observations," adds Amy Simon-Miller, a co-investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.





The visible spectrum, however, was "nearly identical in this case to what we saw for SL9," says Simon-Miller, who recalculated the SL9 spectrum for this analysis. "This isn't surprising, because most of the debris we're looking at is actually burnt-up atmosphere: hydrogen, hydrocarbons, and soot. It's very black, just like the soot we're familiar with, and has a very flat spectrum."

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