Last year, in July, something smacked Jupiter. Hard. It was discovered when an amateur astronomer found a black spot marring Jupiter's cloud tops. Followup observations saw the spot glowing in the infrared, meaning it was hot, and therefore was not just a storm (which are common). For real and for sure, something impacted Jupiter and exploded - and I mean exploded, releasing the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons. But what was it?
A new paper just published indicates that it was an asteroid that hit Jupiter. However, since it wasn't seen beforehand, how do we know? Because we've seen this sort of thing before. In 1994, the big planet was hit repeatedly by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet had broken up into dozens of pieces, including several chunks a kilometer or so across, and they slammed into Jupiter one after another over the course of a ...
