On March 25, 1993, a group of asteroid and comet hunters, looking at the photographic harvest from an intermittently cloudy night at Mount Palomar in California, discovered a faint elongated smudge on their films. It was near a very bright object in the sky, the planet Jupiter. Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy then asked other observers to take a look. The smudge turned out to be something astonishing: some twenty small, bright objects orbiting Jupiter, one behind the other, like pearls on a string. Collectively they are called Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (this is the ninth time that these collaborators have together discovered a periodic comet).

But calling these objects a comet is confusing. There was a horde of them, probably the fragmented remains of a single, hitherto undiscovered, comet. It silently orbited the Sun for 4 billion years before passing too close to Jupiter and being captured, a few decades ago, by the gravity of the Solar System’s largest planet. On July 7, 1992, it was torn apart by Jupiter’s gravitational tides.

You can recognize that the inner part of such a comet would be pulled toward Jupiter a little more strongly than the outer part, because the inner part is closer to Jupiter than the outer part. The difference in pull is certainly small. Our feet are a little closer to the center of the Earth than our heads, but we are not in consequence torn to pieces by the Earth’s gravity. For such tidal disruption to have occurred, the original comet must have been held together very weakly. Before fragmentation, it was, we think, a loosely consolidated mass of ice, rock, and organic matter, maybe 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) across.

The orbit of this disrupted comet was then determined to high precision. Between July 16 and 22, 1994, all the cometary fragments, one after another, collided with Jupiter. The biggest pieces seem to have been a few kilometers across. Their impacts with Jupiter were spectacular.

No one knew beforehand what these multiple impacts into the atmosphere and clouds of Jupiter would do. Perhaps the cometary fragments, surrounded by halos of dust, were much smaller than they seemed. Or perhaps they were not coherent bodies at all, but loosely consolidated—something like a heap of gravel with all the particles traveling through space together, in nearly identical orbits. If either of these possibilities were true Jupiter might swallow the comets without a trace. Other astronomers thought there would at least be bright fireballs and giant plumes as the cometary fragments plunged into the atmosphere. Still others suggested that the dense cloud of fine particles accompanying the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter would disrupt the magnetosphere of Jupiter or form a new ring.

A comet this size should impact Jupiter, it is calculated, only once every thousand years. It’s the astronomical event not of one lifetime, but of a dozen. Nothing on this scale has occurred since the invention of the telescope. So in mid July 1994, in a beautifully coordinated international scientific effort, telescopes all over the Earth and in space turned towards Jupiter.

Astronomers had over a year to prepare. The trajectories of the fragments in their orbits around Jupiter were estimated. It was discovered that they would all hit Jupiter. Predictions of the timing were refined. Disappointingly, the calculations revealed that all impacts would occur on the night side of Jupiter, the side invisible from the Earth (although accessible to the Galileo and Voyager spacecraft in the outer Solar System). But, happily, all impacts would occur only a few minutes before the Jovian dawn, before the impact site would be carried by Jupiter’s rotation into the line of sight from Earth.

The appointed moment for the impact of the first piece, Fragment A, came and went. There were no reports from ground-based telescopes. Planetary scientists stared with increasing gloom at a television monitor displaying the data transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore from the Hubble Space Telescope. There was nothing anomalous Shuttle astronauts took time off from the reproduction of fruit flies, fish, and newts to look at Jupiter through binoculars. They reported seeing nothing. The impact of the millennium was beginning to look very much like a fizzle.

Then there was a report from a ground-based optical telescope in La Palma in the Canary Islands, followed by announcements from a radiotelescope in Japan; from the European Southern Observatory in Chile; and from a University of Chicago instrument in the frigid wastelands of the South Pole. In Baltimore the young scientists crowding around the TV monitor—themselves monitored by the cameras of CNN—began to see something, and in exactly the right place on Jupiter. You could witness consternation turn into puzzlement, and then exultation. They cheered; they screamed; they jumped up and down. Smiles filled the room. They broke out the champagne. Here was a group of young American scientists—about a third of them, including the team leader, Heidi Hammel, women—and you could imagine youngsters all over the world thinking that it might be fun to be a scientist, that this might be a good daytime job, or even a means to spiritual fulfillment.

For many of the fragments, observers somewhere on Earth noticed the fireball rise so quickly and so high that it could be seen even though the impact site below it was still in Jovian darkness. Plumes ascended and then flattened into pancake-like forms. Spreading out from the point of impact we could see sound and gravity waves, and a patch of discoloration that for the largest fragments became as big as the Earth.

Slamming into Jupiter at 60 kilometers a second (130,000 miles an hour), the large fragments converted their kinetic energy partly into shock waves, partly into heat. The temperature in the fireball was estimated at thousands of degrees. Some of the fireballs and plumes were far brighter than all the rest of Jupiter put together.

What is the cause of the dark stains left after the impact? It might be stuff from the deep clouds of Jupiter-from the region to which ground-based observers cannot ordinarily see-that welled up and spread out. However, the fragments do not seem to have penetrated to such depths. Or the molecules responsible for the stains might have been in the cometary fragments in the first place. We know from the Vega 1 and 2 Soviet missions and the Giotto mission of the European Space Agency—both to Halley’s Comet—that comets may be as much as a quarter composed of complex organic molecules. They are the reason that the nucleus of Halley’s Comet is pitch black. If some of the cometary organics survived the impact events, they may have been responsible for the stain. Or, finally, the stain may be due to organic matter not delivered by the impacting cometary fragments, but synthesized by their shock waves from the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Impact of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter was witnessed on seven continents. Even amateur astronomers with small telescopes could see the plumes and the subsequent discoloration of the Jovian clouds. Just as sporting events are covered at all angles by television cameras on the field and from a dirigible high overhead, six NASA spacecraft deployed throughout the Solar System, with different observational specialties, recorded this new wonder—the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Ultraviolet Explorer, and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer all in Earth orbit; Ulysses, taking time out from it investigation of the South Pole of the Sun; Galileo, on the way to its own rendezvous with Jupiter; and Voyager 2, far beyond Neptune on its way to the stars. As the data are accumulated and analyzed, our knowledge of comets, of Jupiter, and of the violent collisions of worlds should all be substantially improved.