jupiter is a gas planet. no solid surface. so when shoemaker-levy9 impacted it, why was there an impact at all

Question

i assume its because the gas is so dense, but just not sure

Answer 1

It was the density and speed, it turned the comet fragments into gas's which exploded.

A nasa article about it is linked below.

Answer 2

Fast-moving things make a big splash because they carry so much kinetic energy. Consider--at the top of the earth's atmosphere, the air is so thin it would suffocate you; yet every night, little rocks completely burn up when they hit that thin, insubstantial stuff. It's because they're moving so fast that their collisions with even the thinnest substance is enough to make them vaporize.

On Jupiter, what counts for a surface may not be solid, but it's a whole lot denser than the earth's atmosphere. Anything that slams into that will have its kinetic energy quickly robbed by friction. That energy then turns into heat, which creates a tremendous explosion. The surface doesn't have to be brittle in order for that to happen.

Even on earth, when a big meteor hits (of the size that made the meteor crater in Arizona), it first burrows a narrow hole straight through the ground, almost as if the ground were a fluid. Once it's deep underground, friction finally stops it, and THEN the huge buildup of heat blows a huge hole from the bottom up.

Answer 3

Water is a liquid, yet when an aircraft hits the surface of water at 600 MPH, it is broken up as effectively as if it had hit land. Similarly, when a comet, traveling at much higher speed, hits the very dense gas of Jupiter's atmosphere, it's as though it had struck a solid object. Your assumption was correct.

edit: please ignore seeta's inane comment. She clearly has no idea what is or is not a mystery to scientists. The impact of Shoemaker-Levy was no mystery, it was merely a spectacle.

Answer 4

Imagine you're jumping into a large pool of water from a height of 3 feet. No problem because you're moving pretty slowly so when you hit the water its molecules can get out of the way. Now jump into the same pool of water going about 40,000 mph. The water is like a stone wall because now the molecules can't get out of your way fast enough but instead bunch up ahead and so present a very dense field. Basically the same thing is why the Shoemaker-Levy impacts in Jupiter made such big bangs.

Answer 5

We don't know even now if there was an "impact" per se. The references to impact all imply "impact" with Jupiter's atmosphere. The only evidences we have of the collisions are the light emissions recorded by Galileo, Hubble, and Earth-based observatories. The evidence of the impacts shows them coinciding with the visible boundary of Jupiter's disc, and we know from long study that Jupiter is certainly gaseous at this point.

Answer 6

just because it is a gas planet does not mean that it has no solid surface. the reason it is a gas planet is because the elements that make up the planet would be a gas here on earth but with the extreme pressure they take of the properties of liquid and solids, and since the most abundant element is hydrogen and it is under eminence pressure it takes on the properties of a metal causing it to have a huge electromagnetic Field(it acutely generates more energy than it exorbs from the sun witch i find absolutely amazing).

Answer 7

Basically Jupiter has a very thick and dense concentration of clouds that are up to 30 miles thick, and the atmospheric pressure is enormous. So when the comet entered Jupiter's atmosphere, it was like throwing an egg at a brick wall.

Answer 8

If it had fallen on earth it would have lit up in the upper atmosphere,and then hit the ground.
On Jupiter it impacted the upper atmosphere and may just never have reached a solid surface.

Answer 9

When you are travelling at 40 kms/sec, everything is a brick wall, including gas.

At that velocity, even interaction with earth's atmosphere would be an impact. Jupiter's atmosphere is far denser and deeper.

Answer 10

Molecules of gas have inertia, try pushing trillions of them suddenly aside and you are sure to get great resistance.