What is Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9)?
Shoemaker-Levy 9 is a comet discovered by David Levy, Eugene Shoemaker, and Carolyn Shoemaker on the night of March 24, 1993. Instead of seeing a single coma and tail, the threesome discovered a coma in the shape of an elongated bar and several tails extending beyond it. Later, more detailed photographs showed the bar to be many individual fragments of the original comet. From July 16, 1994 to July 22, 1994, these fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter. This was the very first time that scientists knew ahead of time where to view the collision of two bodies in space. The impacts were observed by amateur and professional astronomers, along with other scientists. The impact was recorded by satellites and telescopes, both Earth-based and space-based. 14. What is the background of the discoverers of Shoemaker-Levy 9? Eugene Shoemaker was a retired geologist whose interest in comets and meteorites led him to search the world for craters that recorded their impacts. Carolyn Shoem
