Microsoft Research Community

 i'm sorry if this is not a forum for this but, i don't know if it's a error in WWT or a dirt on the telescopes lens or a extraterrestial circular ship, but i just zoomed in on jupiter and there is a black circle on it (it's moving, to the right) it's pretty weird i have screenshot's(but i have no idea how to include them, i'll upload them to my website and i'll post the link here)   you can try zooming on jupiter and checking if that black circle is there, it's moving pretty fast 

 never min, it dissapeared , i suppose it was a error propably

That's cool. I myself just had this fear of an asteroid hitting Earth. (I'm watching a History Channel doco on Asteroids). I think there is not much funding going towards protecting us from gamma ray bursts and other cosmic stuff. I guess that's why I'm concerned. 

Alex

Hello Dom96, this was due to Io casting its shadow upon Jupiter at the time.  The four large moons around Jupiter do this quite often.

Hello Alex, for starters there's no defence against most cosmic things that can get us.  The only warning we get from a gamma ray burst is when we detect the same gamma rays that would wreck our atmosphere.  However at the moment there's no stars close to us that could give off that much energy, this sort of event is probably something in the region of 1 on average every billion years.

Large asteroids or comet impacts aren't much to worry about either, again very rare, maybe a big one every hundred million years on average.  If we did find an asteroid with a couple of years notice we could do something about it.  Comets are a bit more tricky because we'd only have maybe a few months notice if one came but we could probably deal with it.

The Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years, its not about to dissapear next week.