Fragmentation modelling of the August 2019 impact on Jupiter
Ramanakumar Sankar, Csaba Palotai, Ricardo Hueso, Marc Delcroix, Ethan Chappel, Agustin Sanchez-Lavega
(Submitted on 18 Feb 2020)
On 7th August 2019, an impact flash lasting ∼1s was observed on Jupiter. The video of this event was analysed to obtain the lightcurve and determine the energy release and initial mass. We find that the impactor released a total energy of 96−151 kilotons of TNT, corresponding to an initial mass between 190−260 metric tonnes with a diameter between 4−10m. We developed a fragmentation model to simulate the atmospheric breakup of the object and reproduce the lightcurve. We model three different materials: cometary, stony and metallic at speeds of 60, 65 and 70 km/s to determine the material makeup of the impacting object. The slower cases are best fit by a strong, metallic object while the faster cases require a weaker material.
Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2002.07894 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2002.07894v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Ramanakumar Sankar
[v1] Tue, 18 Feb 2020 21:57:39 UTC (1,796 KB)
