Shoemaker - Levy 9 :: essays research papers

Shoemaker - charge 9Over cc million Megatons of dynamite collide with Jupiter. In July 1994 Shoemaker - bill 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.Shoemaker - Levy 9 is a comet, a small irregular mass made up of rocks and frozen gasses. Comets follow large mountain chains 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 sole(prenominal) become visible when they get cozy enough to the Sun for its heat to vaporize the comets gasses causing a coherent 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 c omet follows the law of gravity. Its orbit is decided by the largest object in the solar system, the Sun. Shoemaker - Levy 9 was discovered photographically by Carolyn S. Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker, and David H. Levy on contact 24, 1993. They used the Schmidt telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. Shoemaker - Levy 9 was named for its 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 light speed years.) Shoemaker - Levy 9 was confirmed by James V. Scotti of the Spacewatch course of instruction at the University of Arizona. It was then given the designation 1993e by the International astronomic Unions Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. This designation shows that Shoemaker - Levy 9 was the fifth comet discovered in 1993. On May 22, 1993 Bureau theatre director Brian G. Marsdon reported that Shoemaker - Levy 9 could very well see Jupiter by October of 1993. On October 18, 1993 Paul W. Chodas and Donald K. Yeomans reported to the American Astronomical Societys naval division of Planetary Sciences that the probability of impact of Shoemaker - Levy 9 into Jupiter was great than 99%. They stated that the fragments would hit over a period of several(prenominal) days in the month of July 1994.