How do we know the images of Jupiter on Sept 13 are of something hitting the planet and not something coming out from the surface?

Question

Everything I see is just a a video of a flash of light. How are we so confident of the source of light?

In: 18

Answer 1

Occam’s razor. We know of lots of things that could cause that kind of flash by hitting the surface, because we’ve seen it happen before.

We don’t know of anything that could cause something to fly out of Jupiter like that, so there’s no real reason to assume it would be that.