Over six days in July of 1994, 21 fragments of a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed one after another into the atmosphere of Jupiter as telescopes across the world watched — the first time in recorded history that human beings had ever directly observed a collision between two bodies in the solar system

The first time human beings ever watched two objects hit each other in space was in July 1994, and the observation happened almost by accident because a husband-and-wife astrogeologist team and their Canadian friend had gone to look at Jupiter with a telescope smaller than most contemporary university physics departments consider substantial. The specific mechanism [...] The post Over six days in July of 1994, 21 fragments of a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed one after another into the atmosphere of Jupiter as telescopes across the world watched — the first time in recorded history that human beings had ever directly observed a collision between two bodies in the solar system appeared first on Space Daily .