Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter in 1994, creating an explosion thousands of times more potent than Earth's nuclear arsenal. Skip to content Introducing the all-new Astronomy.com Forum!

JPL/NASA/STScI . In July 1994, the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter after breaking apart into many pieces. Astronomers around the world watched the epic comet crash in real-time with ...

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 experienced one of the most spectacular ends that humans ever witnessed. Several months after its discovery, pieces of the comet smashed into the planet Jupiter.

Image of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 taken in red light on a collision course with Jupiter. Its train of 21 icy fragments stretched across 710 thousand miles (1.1 million km) of space, or 3 times the ...

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered by the Shoemakers and their associate David Levy in 1993. Its impact with Jupiter the next year was a dramatic and widely covered event.

The spectacle of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 pummeling Jupiter was a major news event last month (July 17-22). Scientists could scarcely contain their excitement as they described this unprecedented ...

The Shoemaker’s and Levy co-discovered the comet. The emotional payoff of discovering a comet orbiting a planet was something Levy described as a “magic day,” which occurred on March 23, 1993.

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, taken on May 17, 1994. Credit: NASA/ESA/H. Weaver/E. Smith (STScI) Siraj likened the effect to a pinball machine.

On July 19, 2009, 15 years to the day after the famous comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 peppered Jupiter with huge chunks of ice, the gas giant was hit once again by a cosmic bullet.