Kevin Zahnle (NASA Ames Research Center) and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low (American Museum of Natural History)

Motivated by the Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact with Jupiter in the summer of 1994, scientists began to calculate the effects of such an impact on the comet as well as on Jupiter. Once the comet had traveled deep into the atmosphere, it was ultimately destroyed in a powerful explosion. This explosion sent a plume of material shooting hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers above the cloud tops. The material eventually fell back into the Jovian atmosphere where it produced the scars or spots seen on Jupiter after the collision.

The simulation

Using a complex computer code to calculate the structure and density of the gas, scientists are able to predict what would happen to the gas in the Jovian atmosphere during the collision. In this movie, the comet explodes sending material ballooning out into the atmosphere. After exploding from the upper cloud deck, the material will soon fall back to the atmosphere and come to equilibrium with the surrounding gas in the atmosphere.

Brian Abbott