Comet Shoemaker Levy 9: The Biggest Impact Of This Large Object

In July 1994, a vast comet 2 km in diameter hit Jupiter with the force of 300 million atomic bombs, followed by another 20 impacts that set fire to the clouds of the gaseous planet for six successive days. This was the first time in history that humanity managed to witness live what a planetary collision of colossal magnitudes can do. What happened to Jupiter after impact, and what have we learned since then?
let’s go to start! “Introduction”
THE GREAT DISCOVERY
In 1993 a group of astronomers formed by the couple Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy was conducting research at the Palomar Observatory in California in the USA, when they discovered a massive spot by pure chance in the image records.
It was nothing more and nothing less than a vast periodic comet 2 km in diameter that had been captured by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, which was named Shoemaker-Levy9 in honor of the discoverers. This was an extremely unusual event because although hundreds of comets are known in the solar system, this was the first time that one captured by the gravity of a planet instead of the gravity of the sun was observed.
Usually, periodic comets are those that orbit the sun in less than 200 years, but Jupiter is so massive and its gravitational attraction force so great that it can capture any object that gets too close to it; in fact, astronomers believe that many of its moons are asteroids that were captured by Jupiter and never managed to escape its gravitational field.
The image of the discovery gave the first proof that it was a strange comet since it had multiple nuclei in a region approximately 50 arcseconds long; for reference, common comets usually have a single nucleus. In contrast, Shoemaker-Levy9 had about 20, which indicated that something must have happened in the past that fragmented it into several pieces.

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