Around midnight on July 19, an Australian astronomer named Anthony Wesley noticed something new while looking through his telescope at Jupiter: a black spot in the planet's south polar region, similar to one that appeared in 1994 after it was struck by the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet. Wesley rushed to share his observation with other astronomers, who trained their own telescopes on the planet; infrared images captured with both NASA and Keck telescopes confirmed that the spot was, in fact, almost certainly the impact site from a recent asteroid or comet strike.
Jupiter's New Spot from Science in Action on Vimeo.
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