Word: cometed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...First a Spanish observatory announced that it had spotted a plume of gas billowing up from the edge of Jupiter. Then a group of observers in Chile confirmed the sighting, and so did another team based at the South Pole. But although the first of the 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the giant planet shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern time, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, had to wait for images to be beamed down from the orbiting Hubble telescope. Finally, at about 8, the first pictures came up on the video screen...
...moon. Despite scientists' sober warnings that the Great Comet Crash of 1994 might be an uneventful dud, the first chunk plowed into Jupiter's atmosphere with the force of perhaps 10 million hydrogen bombs, lofting a mushroom cloud of hot gas nearly 1,000 miles out into space and leaving a dark scar on the planet's familiar, brightly colored clouds. The assembled astronomers looked at the video screen for a second in silent disbelief -- then began cheering and toasting one another with swigs from champagne bottles. Said Hammel: "This is the kind of stuff I've been dreaming about...
Then she grabbed a bottle and ran upstairs to tell three visitors who had a special stake in the Hubble results: the people who had discovered the comet. Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker are a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders; David Levy, an amateur astronomer, often helps them. When the partners found Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993, they knew it was unusual, and further observation revealed that it was not one comet but at least 21 fragments, remnants of a single object that had been torn apart a year earlier...
Fragment Q1 of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet hurtled into Jupiter late this afternoon, and two more pieces are expected to bombard the same spot on the planet shortly. The upcoming shower follows two smaller impacts earlier today. Q1, R and S are only slightly smaller than the largest fragment, G, which hit Monday and caused the highly visible "black eye" of Jupiter...
Jupiter, already suffering a "black eye," was battered again by the splintered Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet. The eighth fragment, K, produced another huge fireball that lifted from the planet and grew to three times the size of Earth. Calculations of yesterday's damage from Fragments G and H are still being made. But astronomers are predicting that the huge hole called a black eye, which was caused by G, may become an even more distinguishing feature than Jupiter's Great Red Spot...