Shoemaker-Levy 9's 10th Anniversary

Chuck1318 writes "July 16 is the 10th anniversary of the first impact of pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on the planet Jupiter. The Planetary Society is marking this occasion with a call for applications for Shoemaker grants to fund "amateur and underfunded professional observers anywhere in the world." Shoemaker-Levy 9 created impact features on Jupiter that were larger than the Earth and helped stimulate the search for possible earth-impacting objects."

Thank you, Jupiter!

[adeyadey]

You can thank Jupiter for catching comets like shoemaker-levy. More recent theories indicate that Jupiter acts like a giant hoover, catching debris that would otherwise end up hitting earth, which in turn would make advanced life on Earth impossible due to frequency of large impacts.

Even as it is, impacts the size of the Meteor that hit Tunguska, Siberia in 1907 probably happen every at least century or so - and if that happened over New York, you can say goodbye NY..

True, but...

[DrMorpheus]

You have to remember that most of the material that the solar system accreated from was in a disk around the sun. So most of the dangerous debris is on the plane of the ecliptic, which sorta renders the Solar System 2D.

Now the gas giants do indeed "hoover" up a lot of the space debris that might otherwise hit the inner planets you also have to realize that they're also responsible for causing debris from the Kuniper Belt and Oort Cloud to decend out of their respective places in the outer Solar System into the inner Solar System. Due to gravitational perturbation.

So I'd argue the gas giants are sort of a mixed blessing overall.

Re:True, but...

[barakn]

And also asteroids within the main belt that get to close to a resonant orbit. This phenomenon is invoked to explain how the remnants of collisions in the asteroid belt can arrive at Earth so quickly [space.com]. It's better to think of the giant planets as orbit randomizers than as Hoovers.

Re:True, but...

[Chuck1318]

The thing that amazed me when I read about that collision is that even today, 500 million years later, 20 per cent [innovations-report.de] of all meteorites are remnants from that collision.