Whack ! Jupitor struck again !
 

Is Jupitor the celistial dartboard of our solar system?

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-112

Bigger target, easier to hit? Glad to live on a smaller planet. :D

Jupiter is Earths bodyguard, be glad it's there :yeah:

What strikes me (pun intended) is that with all the eyes on the sky to watch for this sort of thing an amateur astronomer had to point out "Hey you guys see that spot on Jupitor"?

They dont know what it was, they can guess when, they can guess how big, but the fact remains this impact came as a complete supprise.

Jupiter is over twice as massive than all of the other planets in the Solar System combined, so the gravitational pull has probably saved our celestial bacon on more than one occasion...

Exactly. It's be highly unlikely that complex evolution could have sustained itself on Earth without a Jupiter nearby to absorb these impacts. That is one of the things astronomers look for when trying to find systems where life is possible.

Only a matter of time.

Hehe, sometimes Jupiter is the solar system's black sheep. It sometimes captures long period comets and places them on shorter period orbits, towards the solars system's inner planets. You guessed it! Earth is one of those!:D

Well that could be. But it also neutralises them as well by deflecting them away from the solar system.

edit. But the whole thing with basically unknown things hitting planets in the solar system is pretty alarming to say the least. There seems to be this false notion that the scientists know whats out there and that the odds of being hit are like, really miniscule. Yea right.

Jupiter is the second biggest gravity well in our solar system and holds more than 90% of the whole solar systems angular momentum. Tis a nice giant planet to have.

False notion with the public perhaps. I once heard a talk in which the speaker said that most near Earth asteroids are discovered after they've passed.

That's because we're using earth based telescopes, so we can only search the night sky, and since almost all objects are orbiting in the same direction as Earth, we won't see one approaching because it's coming from the sun side. Were we to have observations from points in space, we could be more selective in the areas we search, and have more warning.

Firewall is right ... Saint Peter said it even better,
"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat;
both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up."

Wasn't there a passage about stars falling from the heavens and the earth shaking in Revelations too? Rather fuzzy, it's been a while.

Yes it does, but I believe it is at the end of time as man knows it (the end of the 1,000 years of peace)

Here is a better persepective of our sun and the planets ... sort of hard to miss a target that big (our star that is)

http://www.theworldwideweather.com/Awesom3.jpg

So, not in the foreseeable future?