Comet SL9 Background
History and Physical Parameters
- Orbit:
- Comet SL9 orbited the Sun for about 4.5 billion years,then was
captured by Jupiter a few decades ago.
- Broke-Up:
- Shoemaker-Levy 9's previous closest approach to Jupiter (when it broke up)
was on July 7, 1992; the distance from the center of Jupiter was about 96,000
km, or about 1.3 Jupiter radii.
- Discovered:
- 24 March 1993, by Eugene and Carolyn
Shoemaker and David H. Levy .
Comet Train:
In the days prior to impact, the fragment comet train stretched across 20 arcminutes of the sky, more than half the Moon's angular diameter. This translates to a physical length of about 5 million kilometers, more than 12 times the Earth-Moon distance. The train expanded in length due to the differential orbital motion between the first and the last fragments.
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© Copyright Amara Graps, 1995-2003. |