Word: comets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Shoemaker-Levy 9 really a comet -- or an asteroid...
Amateur astronomer David Levy, who with Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker discovered S-L 9, points out that comets were originally distinguished by their appearance. They are objects that look like fuzzy stars with tails, and in any previous century astronomers would have called this discovery a comet. On that basis, argues Levy, "S-L 9 is a comet, period...
...week of visual superlatives, of images both awesome and horrifying. Astronomers said they had never seen anything like the fireworks produced when comet chunks, one of them roughly as big as an alp, crashed into the planet Jupiter. International relief workers said the same thing, only they were referring to the tide of refugees streaming out of Rwanda and into overnight cities of misery, disease and death. Certainly the millions of people who watched these two cataclysms unfold through news photographs and televised images had never seen anything like them either...
...witnesses, either firsthand or at the remove of film or TV, must supply their own contexts to make sense of what they are seeing. Faced with something new in their visual experiences, they are likely to jump to questionable conclusions. After watching three comet fragments pound, at around 130,000 m.p.h., into Jupiter's dense atmosphere, Steve Maran, an understandably elated NASA astronomer, called the sight "the greatest one-two-three punch of all time." Meanwhile, Filippo Grandi, director of emergency aid for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, surveyed the unimaginable conditions around Goma, % the sleepy Zairean border town...
...smashes into the ground with the force of 6 million H-bombs, gouging out a crater the size of Rhode Island and throwing so much pulverized real estate into the stratosphere that the sun is blocked for months and Earth goes into a worldwide deep freeze. If the comet hits an ocean, a pall of dust rises from underwarter sediment, and a tidal wave several thousand feet high races across the sea and hundreds of miles inland...