Just As Cool As It Is Sobering

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Series Three:

Friday, July 31, 2009 at 8:41am:

I've been scouting around since I first heard about this a week ago and came across an article that explains the phenomenon a little better than some of the earlier stuff.

Basically, the reason that astronomers on earth didn't see or anticipate whatever it was that struck Jupiter last week, was that it may have come flying into our solar system at top speed and struck the planet from the backside about 10 hours before the planet's rotationallowed us to observe the scar or "black eye".

Jupiter mainly, and the other gas giants, have always served as kind of a filtration system for our solar system, but of course they don't catch everything. The timing is the really intriguing thing to me; whatever that thing was, a comet, an asteroid, a chunk of planet, it just happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time depending on how you look at it)

yikes. Considering the lack of urgency and preparation the world community already
eems to have regarding Near Earth Objects, I can't imagine the shitstorm that would occured if we looked up and saw that damn thing headed toward our little blue planet.