A cosmic collision was caught on video earlier this month when an unknown object slammed into Jupiter while amateur astronomers watched.
It’s not clear whether the object that hit the planet on March 17 was a comet or asteroid, but a NASA scientist told Space.com it was probably the latter.
“It’s more likely to be an asteroid simply because there are more of them,” Paul Chodas, head the agency’s Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the website.
Whatever it was, multiple witnesses viewed the collision, including an amateur astronomer based in Ireland who was just hoping to create a great time-lapse video.
“The original purpose of the imaging session was to get this time-lapse, with a happy coincidence of the impact in the second last capture of the night,” John McKeon wrote in the YouTube description.
The time-lapse was stunning even without the impact:
