Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet Aftermath

This is a portion of Jupiter, as pictured by the Hubble Space
Telescope. Source

In 1993 a comet was discovered and
looked likely to pass close to, or into, Jupiter.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 passed near enough that
the gravitational forces from Jupiter ripped the comet
apart, which separated into several fragments,
spun back around and impacted with Jupiter
in a spectacular manner.

Jupiter is our largest planet, very massive,and
tends to attract a lot of space rocks.
However Jupiter can just as easily perturb
the orbits of bodies moving not quite
close enough to be captured.










































For some scale, that dark spot to the right,
with the dark crescent is about one quarter
to one third the width of the Earth. That spot,
and the smaller one to the upper left, are in fact
two of the impact scars from the comet. There was
little more than a year of notice before a rock big
enough to cause another massive extinction event on
Earth smashed into one of our neighbors.[Tate] The neighbor
the size of a large skyscraper, with signs reading "hit me"
all over the sides, but still close to home. There has been
some effort to determine how many asteroids and such we
have moving in the solar system, as well as prediction of where
they will end up. The n-body problem presents itself.









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