Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...force from the explosions produced when the many fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the solar system's largest planet was the equivalent of several trillion nuclear bombs...
...result, the event left a large and elaborated scar across the planet's surface. The features of the impact site have been debated across the world during the past several days...
...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 -- and there, right at Jupiter's edge...
...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...
...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 by Jupiter's gravity -- and that all would crash into the massive planet between July 16 and July 22 in the most violent event in the recorded history of the solar system...