Lessons from Shoemaker-Levy 9 about Jupiter and planetary impacts

From July 16 through 22, 1994, at least 16 fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter. The events caught worldwide public attention, which was heightened by several factors. The impact sites were visible in small telescopes, and many people took their first magnified look at the night sky. Also, the public was becoming aware of the terrestrial impact hazard from near-Earth objects, the optics of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had been corrected the previous December, and the World Wide Web was bringing the Internet into the homes of ordinary citizens. This chapter reviews our current understanding of these landmark events. Impactors as large as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (hereafter SL9, and also D/1993 F2) currently hit Jupiter every few centuries (Bottke et al. 2002, Levison et al. 2000, Roulston and Ahrens 1997, Zahnle et al. 2003, Chapter 18), but they were much more frequent during planetary accretion. If all of Jupiter’s heavy elements were delivered by SL9-like impactors, the average rate over its existence would be one impact every 20 minutes. Impacts 10 times less energetic than SL9 occur annually on Earth, and they involve similar physics (Figure 8.1 and Boslough and Crawford 1997, Boslough and Gladstone 1997, Shuvalov 1999). SL9 offered us a rare glimpse of this process, and also provided a perturbation experiment of the sort that is very difficult to arrange in planetary science.

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