We are
looking at a picture of the planet Jupiter taken with the Hubble Space Telescope
in 1994, at a time when the fragments of shattered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
were pummeling into the planet, leaving huge black impact
sites on the planet.
A bunch of them going in kind of like this.
Prior to Shoemaker-Levy 9,
We had never had the opportunity to prepare
to watch an interplanetary impact
in our solar system.
Isn’t that incredible? That’s amazing. That’s what we all say.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
was a comet that was discovered by Gene and Carolyn
Shoemaker and David Levy,
Which is why it's called Shoemaker-Levy 9.
It was the ninth Comet that team had found.
And what was unusual about Shoemaker-Levy 9
was that it was in orbit around Jupiter.
We believe was captured probably about 70 years earlier,
the late 1920s.
It wasn't just flying through the solar system.
It had, at some point in the past, been captured
by the gravitational field of Jupiter.
And more importantly than that, when the orbit of the comet
was computed, it was discovered that within
about six months this comet was going to hit Jupiter.
We think the reason that Shoemaker-Levy 9 was shattered
into so many fragments was that on its last close pass
while it was orbiting Jupiter, the gravitation was so strong,
the gravity field that it actually caused it to fragment and break up.
I was asked to take all
of the proposals that had been accepted to look at Jupiter
as the comet was hitting it and put them together into one large
observing program, with Hubble so that it could capture
all the full range of what may happen on Jupiter.
Everybody who predicted that we would see something
dramatic was right.
And the Hubble observations were fantastic.
We saw massive explosions, we saw ripples in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
We saw dark material that was processed
by the intense heat of these explosions.
This image of Jupiter, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope,
was one of the most dramatic images from the Shoemaker-Levy 9 week.
It was a week long event.
It took that long for all the fragments of this shattered comet to hit Jupiter.
This particular image is of a particularly large fragment.
It created a massive plume of material
that shot out for thousands of miles above Jupiter's cloud tops.
It took about 20 minutes to rise and then collapsed.
And so the arc that we see in the bottom of this image
is the collapsed material from this gigantic plume.
It was just an amazing
example of the power of collisions in our solar system.