Shoemaker - Levy 9 :: essays research papers

Shoemaker - Levy 9   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Over 200 million Megatons of dynamite collide with Jupiter. In July 1994 Shoemaker - Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. What is Shoemaker - Levy 9, and how was it discovered? What is Jupiter, and why did Shoemaker - Levy 9 collide with it? Can an event like this happen to Earth? I will answer these questions in this report. But let me start by telling you what Shoemaker - Levy 9 is.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Shoemaker - Levy 9 is a comet, a small irregular mass made up of rocks and frozen gasses. Comets follow large orbits from around the Sun to the outer corners of our solar system. A comet is so fragile that if you could hold a piece of it in your hands you could pull it apart. Comets only become visible when they get close enough to the Sun for it's heat to vaporize the comet's gasses causing a long tail called the coma. The coma of a comet can be millions of miles long. The comets themselves are only between 20 and 750 kilometers wide. Like all other objects the comet follows the law of gravity. It's orbit is decided by the largest object in the solar system, the Sun.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Shoemaker - Levy 9 was discovered photographically by Carolyn S. Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker, and David H. Levy on March 24, 1993. They used the Schmidt telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. Shoemaker - Levy 9 was named for it's discoverers and the nine indicates that it was the ninth short period comet discovered by this team. (A short period comet is a comet that has an orbit that lasts less than two hundred years.) Shoemaker - Levy 9 was confirmed by James V. Scotti of the Spacewatch Program at the University of Arizona. It was then given the designation 1993e by the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. This designation shows that Shoemaker - Levy 9 was the fifth comet discovered in 1993. On May 22, 1993 Bureau Director Brian G. Marsdon reported that Shoemaker - Levy 9 could very well hit Jupiter by October of 1993. On October 18, 1993 Paul W. Chodas and Donald K. Yeomans reported to the American Astrono mical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences that the probability of impact of Shoemaker - Levy 9 into Jupiter was greater than 99%. They stated that the fragments would hit over a period of several days in the month of July 1994.