BEST PR EXERCISE EVER.

An approximately Earth-sized explosion was filmed on Jupiter.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/19299984@N08/7976507568/

Well done, Uber. Very well done.

hahahaha

LOL Brilliant post, and perfect timing for PA huh?

I love it :mrgreen:

oh no my commander!

haha, problem is if they destroy the damned planet before they make the game there won't be anyone around to play it

I guess we know what happens when a meteor hits a gas giant now.

I posted this in the "Asteroids hitting gas giants" thread because of the massive amount of relevance and no one even responded...

Anyways, asteroid hit Jupiter all the time. It's just that not many of them are large enough to leave even a temporary scar that is noticable and of those, not many are captured live. Jupiter is kind of the protector of the inner solar system. Probably one of the main reasons life has been able to linger on this rock for so long.

You have to admit though, the timing is impeccable. Only could have been better if it was right on the 1.5 mil mark.

reality produces the best awesome

Recent studies tend to show that Jupiter sent as much, if not more asteroids and comets to the inner system than it deflected.
So take that, Jupiter, it's payback time! (Well, next time we should throw something bigger, though.)

I could understand asteroids, but wouldn't any comet venturing past Jupiter already be going in to the inner solar system considering it's on it's way to a close orbit with the Sun?

If the closest point of its orbit was just behind Jupiter's orbit, for example, and it passed close to Jupiter itself, it could be thrown to the inner system, while it wouldn't have gone this close to the Sun otherwise.
In fact, it's hard to come up with the exact numbers of how many times this happen, compared to how many times asteroids or comets bound to the inner system are ejected, put in a larger orbit or crash on Jupiter, but as far as I read, last studies tend to calculate the former more important than the latter, contrary to what we thought for a long time.

I think it's hard to figure out the exact protection/danger level from Jupiter when we can't find all the darn rocks and slushies. They're really good at hiding, also, over a billion years I bet enough got ate by Jupiter to give anyone a headache. We're probably looking at the 0.01% survivors at this point.

Also, specifically an ice cream headache.

They're not really looking at (well, they are also looking at) them, but they are mostly toying with statistics. The models describe how many asteroids and comets are passing, following each orbits, they simulate what happens when Jupiter is around, and calculate how many are sent to the inner system which wouldn't have originally, and vice-versa.
For example, there may one comet coming close to Jupiter every (arbitrary number) millennia, and such a comet is sent through the inner system once out of ten times.

Sorry, more seriously my point is that there are a lot of things probably that we don't know to add to the sims because we don't see them because they're all gone. We can do a lot in sim, but it can only sim what you tell it too.

True. We were wrong before, we may still be wrong today. Maybe some future study will show that, say, Jupiter has precisely no influence on how many things we take on the head, maybe it will show that we take more small and less big rocks, maybe something else...

Still, TAKE THAT JUPITER!