What is Shoemaker-Levy 9?
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered photographically the husband and wife scientific team of Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and amateur astronomer David Levy on March 24, 1993, using the 0.46 meter (18-inch) Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Its discovery was a serendipitous product of their continuing search for “near-Earth objects,” those whose orbits bring them closer to the Sun than the, Earth’s orbit and thus have some potential for collisions with Earth. The “9” indicates that it was the ninth short-period comet (i.e., with a period, or the time it takes to orbit the Sun, less than 200 years) discovered by this team. The appearance of the comet was reported as “most unusual”: the object appeared as a “dense linear bar” with a “fainter, wispy tail.” The comet’s brightness was reported as about magnitude 14, more than a thousand times too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Latter observations revealed that the “bar” was made up of as many as 21
