a major winter storm one of the bruising fight to win Tuesday's Republican Coast dangerous virus

in 1994 astronomers witnessed something that no one had ever seen before

scientists say it will be the most violent series of collisions ever witnessed in history

a comet broken into 23 pieces slammed into the planet Jupiter leaving scars in the gaseous atmosphere as big as the Pacific Ocean

known as the shoemaker-levy comet the event was recorded by telescopes around the world and recognized as the first planetary impact observe

in space

today the biggest impact yet with an explosion so massive

it temporarily blinded many telescopes we got to see impact after impact after impact

and then we saw material get thrown out into the atmosphere and blown around by the winds

at the time it seemed like a rare occurrence but impacts like these are a natural phenomenon in the solar system and it turns out a fairly common experience

on Jupiter

there was a fairly large impact in 2009 and then in 2010

we observed Fireball and the other one is inside

Amber

and I in 2012 September there was another

entry flash as one astronomer put it it looks like Jupiter has taken one for the team

at the University of Central Florida astronomers Joseph Harrington and chobe Palette I

are leading a project funded by the National Science Foundation that studies precisely how comets impact Jupiter and

also provides valuable information about what might happen

if a comet struck Earth

we can say

for Earth decides impactors will be dangerous disease

things like to remove my baby injures

a comet is a large Rocky ball of ice that orbits the Sun and usually has

a long tail of debris trailing behind it

sometimes a comet's orbit is affected by the gravity of planets

and can be pulled onto a path that intersects the orbit of the planet resulting

in a spectacular Collision

a huge Fireball appeared above the Horizon

generated by a force equal to hundreds of atom bombs

Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system

famous for

it's 300 year-old storm known as the Great Red Spot Jupiter is over 1300 times larger than Earth by volume and three hundred times larger by mass

because of its mass Jupiter's gravity pulls in more asteroids and comets than any other planet

other than the sun Jupiter is the biggest gravitational influence in the solar system and it just generally acts as a bit of a vacuum cleaner

for material occasionally these impacts are recorded by a telescope a photograph of Jupiter has captured a flash on the

so the massive Planet

believed to be the impact of a comet or asteroid

the evidence mostly blurry photos are often times all astronomers have to learn about the comet

by analyzing photos and other information Harrington and Palette I are able to extract measurements and other information

that they then plug into a 3D computer simulation

these models help determine other traits of the impact

based on this information that we get from observations

we

run numerical simulations computer simulations

and we try to

determine the missing pieces of the puzzle

the computer simulations first begin looking at the comets and tree into Jupiter's atmosphere

as a plunges towards the planet the comet heats up

as the atmosphere starts to get thicker and thicker as it plunges down

it's a few seconds before this large body of ice is being completely ripped apart by the atmosphere as the comet vaporizes it spews a trail of extremely

hot gas into Jupiter's atmosphere

we're

creating a bright flash and then we saw the flashes we can get a size estimate and it was at the shallow impact was it have perpendicular impact

the hot gases around the comet then begin to rise rapidly through the cooler air of the planet

until it pushes through the atmosphere creating a plume of hot gas

it goes into space very slightly and falls back down onto the atmosphere of the planet and then it spreads out over a very large range tens of thousands

of miles

the computer models designed by Harrington and Paolo tie help them predict

what future Comet impacts on Jupiter might look like by allowing them to change the size the speed and other variables of the Comet the more we work with

this the more interesting questions we find to answer this can be applied to impacts on the earth it can be applied to impact on other planets

as comets and asteroids continue to share the space in our solar system astronomers are studying their collisions with planets like Jupiter

something that could have a real impact back here on Earth