Before I made the discovery I was a bit disappointed by the video because the seeing wasn’t that great, that’s why I waited several days before analyzing the footage. I first discovered the light spot after I loaded the video into Autostakkert. I immediately thought of Shoemaker Levy 9 and then I uploaded the video onto YouTube and shared the video with the German speaking astronomy community which quickly confirmed my discovery.

Dr Mark Boslough, Chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel wrote: 

Jupiter has always been the target of impacts by comets and asteroids, but we don’t usually get to witness them. Our first opportunity was in the summer of 1994, when a train of fragments from the broken Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed spectacularly, one-by-one, into the gas giant’s atmosphere, leaving Earth-sized scars in the clouds that could be seen by amateur astronomers. A similar scar appeared in 2009 and is attributed to an impact, even though the event itself was not observed. In 2010 and 2012, bright bolides (intense flashes of light) on Jupiter were recorded by amateurs. This has just happened again, but the flashes weren’t immediately noticed and have only recently come to light.

Ricardo Hueso from the University of the Basque Country wrote:

On Sunday, March 20th, turmoil began online on web pages and popular social media sites among amateur astronomers. A few days ago reports of an impact on Jupiter began to circulate. Gerrit Kernbauer, an amateur astronomer from Mödling, Austria had captured a video of Jupiter in which he observed a flash of light that lasted about a second. A second video of the same occurrence was captured by John McKeon from north Dublin, Ireland, who searched for the impact after news of this event. So it was true: an unknown object had impacted the planet on March 17, 2016 at 00:18:33 UT. It hit the planet with so much energy, that the released light could be captured with modest size telescopes. Gerrit Kernbauer was using a telescope with an aperture of 20 cm and John McKeon a bigger 28 cm scope. If you had been observing the planet at that time with a telescope, you would have spotted a brief flash of light comparable to a +5 magnitude star appearing and disappearing smoothly in the planet. In the video by John McKeon, you can even see beautiful diffraction patterns of the bright point source on the right side the planet.

FROM OUR EXPERT BLOG:

ADXP and JPL Fellow Don Yeomans on Asteroid 2013 TX68:

Scientists from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA announced in February that a 30 meter sized near-Earth asteroid, tagged 2013 TX68, would pass safely by the Earth on March 8 of this year at a likely distance of 5 million kilometers, or about 13 times the distance between the Earth and Moon. Their earlier, initial analysis suggested an Earth close approach on March 5 of this year with a remote (one in 250 million) Earth impact possibility in September of next year. This preliminary analysis was later revised to suggest a not-so- close Earth approach on March 8th. Asteroid 2013 TX68 was not observed during this early March Earth approach, but even so, there is no possibility of an Earth collision either in September of next year or at any time in the next one 100 years.