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Is the flash highlighted in blue a data glitch, or something more?<\/p>\n
Mario Rana<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
Something may have just hit Saturn \u2013 and, if so, an amateur astronomer could hold the key to confirming the event, which would be the first ever recorded on the gas giant.<\/p>\n
About seven asteroids or comets are estimated to impact Saturn every year, but no such event has ever been caught on camera. Now, NASA employee and amateur astronomer Mario Rana has recorded images that appear to show just that.<\/p>\n
Rana is a contributor to a project called DeTeCt that uses software to analyse images of Jupiter and Saturn in the hopes of picking up the momentary flash of an impact. If two such flashes are caught in different data taken with different telescopes \u2013 ruling out the chance that the object is a glitch \u2013 then an impact can be verified.<\/p>\n
Ricardo Hueso at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, who also works on DeTeCt, says that work is under way to find data that can confirm if Rana\u2019s detected flash is the <\/span>\u201csignature of a faint impact or if it is just a noisy pixel in the camera\u201d. In particular, astronomers want footage of Saturn taken on 5 July<\/span> between 9am and 9.15am UTC.<\/p>\n \u201cIf only one person sees this flash \u2013 and that\u2019s where we\u2019re at the minute \u2013 there\u2019s still a very high chance it won\u2019t be real. It\u2019ll just be a speckle in their observations,\u201d says Leigh Fletcher at the University of Leicester, UK. \u201cIf somebody else saw the same flash, fantastic, we\u2019ve got an impact.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mark Norris at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, says that the popularity of astronomy as a hobby and the quality of modern telescopes bode well. \u201cThere\u2019s a fair chance out there that someone has something that they either haven\u2019t looked at yet, or they just discounted it as a problem they were having,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n That said, even if the impact is verified, there is a limited amount of science that can be done with the data, due to a lack of information about the object. The ideal scenario would be spotting an object ahead of time and being able to make observations so that we know its speed and mass, and therefore be able to judge the effects of its impact against known variables. This happened when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1994, the first time we had ever had advanced notice of a collision between a comet and a planet.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n