The final major piece of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was to hit just after midnight, completing a ring of crater-like plumes of swirling superheated gas and debris thousands of miles across. "It hit Jupiter like a string of machine-gun bullets" said Eugene Shoemaker, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., who helped discover the comet last year.
The Shoemaker-Levy comet hit Jupiter.