Did something just hit Saturn? Astronomers are racing to find out

Something can just strike Saturn – and, in the affirmative, an amateur astronomer could hold the key to confirm the event, which would be the first recorded on the gas giant.

It is estimated that around seven asteroids or comets would have an impact on Saturn each year, but no event of this type has never been taken in camera. Now, NASA employee and amateur astronomer Mario Rana has recorded images that seem to show it.

Rana contributes to a project called Detect which uses software to analyze the images of Jupiter and Saturn in the hope of collecting the momentary flash of an impact. If two of these flashes are captured in different data taken with different telescopes – excluding the risk that the object is a problem – then an impact can be verified.

Ricardo Hueso at the University of the Basque Country of Spain, which also works on detection, says that work is underway to find data that can confirm whether the Rana detected flash is the “”Signature of a low impact or if it is only a noisy pixel in the camera ”. In particular, astronomers want Saturn images taken on July 5 Between 9 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. UTC.

“If only one person sees this flash – and this is where we are at the minute – there is still a very good chance that this is not real. It will just be a Mouchet in his observations, ”explains Leigh Fletcher at the University of Leicester, in the United Kingdom. “If someone else saw the same fantastic flash, we have an impact.”

Mark Norris at the University of the Central Lancashire, in the United Kingdom, says that the popularity of astronomy as a hobby and the quality of modern telescopes increase well. “There is a good chance that someone had something he has not yet looked at, or they have simply reduced it as a problem he had,” he said.

That said, even if the impact is verified, there is a limited quantity of science which can be carried out with the data, due to a lack of information on the object. The ideal scenario would be to identify an object in advance and be able to make observations so that we know its speed and mass, and therefore be able to judge the effects of its impact against the known variables. This happened when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter in 1994, the first time we had an advance of a collision between a comet and a planet.