Fragments of a Comet Crash into Jupiter

On the night of March 24, 1993, astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene Shoemaker, and David Levy photographed an unusual celestial object using the eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. Instead of a single compact nucleus, the image displayed multiple distinct nuclei distributed across an elongated zone. Further calculations by orbit specialists quickly confirmed that this newly cataloged body, named Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, was not orbiting the Sun as typical comets do. Instead, it was bound in a highly eccentric Jovian orbit, having likely been captured by Jupiter's gravity years before its discovery.

Orbital reconstructions indicated that the comet had experienced an exceptionally close encounter with Jupiter on July 7, 1992. During that passage, it came within roughly 40,000 kilometers of the planet's cloud tops, placing it deep inside Jupiter's Roche limit. The intense tidal forces exerted by the giant planet pulled the fragile icy parent body apart, breaking a nucleus estimated at about 1.5 to 2 kilometers wide into a train of more than 20 pieces. Subsequent orbital modeling indicated that this string of fragments was set on a collision course, scheduled to strike Jupiter's southern hemisphere during mid-July 1994.