[Kozak]

Pretty fricking scary that something that big slammed into Jupiter and we never saw it coming...

[silverleaf]

and that an amateur spotted it

How much are we paying that guy vs the pros? The same ones who tell us there the ones they are tracking are low threat.

[MrB]

God put Jupiter there for this very purpose.
Whether we observe this protection is irrelevant.

I imagine there are quite a few other protective measures in place that we have no clue about,

but when we find them, scientists will say “oh, how lucky we are”.

[ROLF of the HILL COUNTRY]

“Pretty fricking scary that something that big slammed into Jupiter and we never saw it coming...”

What's scarier is the pickup-sized rock that missed us here on Earth last year by only 80,000 miles, and we didn't see it until it had gone by!

[TSgt]

Pretty fricking scary that something that big slammed into Jupiter and we never saw it coming...

Look on the bright side, if it happened to earth you would never know it!

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Jupiter is still very far away. There are lots of things that cross his orbit that will never come anywhere near Earth. (And vice-versa).

The object that hit Jupiter was definitely not Earth sized, btw, the debris cloud was.

The object could have been an asteriod that got ejected from the asteroid belt, or more likely, a visitor from the Ort cloud or Kuiper belt, out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Every once in while, a piece of rock from out there is perturbed into an orbit that approachs closer to the Sun. When that happens it will soon either be ejected by gravitational interaction with Jupiter and the other gas giants or hit something. The something most likely to get hit is Jupiter, because of his large cross section and because his gravitational field acts like a cometary vacuum cleaner, sucking in anything that comes too close.

We are only now beginning to catalog all the junk out there.

[Huebolt]

Pretty fricking scary that something that big slammed into Jupiter and we never saw it coming...

It was the NORTH KOREAN'S new Mile Long Dong missile!

[BwanaNdege]

Actually, it reminds us that Jupiter is still doing its job of collecting asteroids & comets that might otherwise impact the Earth.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

If the object were “earth sized”, within 50% or the mass of the Earth, the orbital periods of the Galiean satellites will change quite noticably, by about 0.3%. The periods of the Galiean satellites were one of the first accurate indications of the speed of light. Their crossing of Jupiter’s face appeared later or sooner depending on the Earth-Jupiter distance. Roemer took advantage of this fact in 1676 to publish the first reasonable estimate of the speed of light.