An asteroid or icy object collided with the gas giant Jupiter on Sept.

The resulting one or two-second flash is similar to the bright flash sometimes seen on Earth when a decently-sized asteroid blows up in the atmosphere, a phenomenon known as an "airburst." In 2013, for example, a powerful airburst occurred when a rock some 56-feet wide exploded over Russia, releasing "30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb," the European Space Agency said.

Now days after the event, astronomers don't think the object could have been too large (say, more than some 330 feet across, or 100 meters) because the impact would have left lasting holes in Jupiter's clouds.

In 1994, for example, massive chunks (some half-a-mile wide) of the broken-apart comet Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 left giant gashes in the Jovian atmosphere that lasted for months.

"It blew these giant Earth-sized holes in the clouds," explained Paul Byrne, an associate professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St.

Astronomers and other researchers use this brightness to gauge the size of an impacting object, explained Cathy Plesko, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who researches asteroid and comet impacts.

"It's extremely unlikely something giant will come out of nowhere and hit us," said Byrne.

As Mashable previously reported, scientists estimate that thousands of Near Earth Objects (objects in Earth's neighborhood) wider than 460 feet have yet to be found.

An asteroid believed to be some 100 to 170 feet across left a 600-foot-deep crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago.