Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 When the comet passed Jupiter in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it happened to be near its aphelion, and found itself slightly within Jupiter's Hill sphere. Jupiter's gravity nudged the comet towards it. Because the comet's motion with respect to Jupiter was very small, it fell almost straight toward Jupiter, which is why it ended up on a Jove-centric orbit of very high eccentricity—that is to say, the ellipse was nearly flattened out. The comet had apparently passed extremely close to Jupiter on July 7, 1992, just over above its cloud tops—a smaller distance than Jupiter's radius of ,
Rings of Saturn has been attributed to a perturbation caused by impact of material from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994. The C Ring is a wide but faint ring located inward of the B Ring. It was discovered in 1850 by William and George Bond, though William R. Dawes and Johann Galle also saw it independently. William Lassell termed it the "Crepe Ring" because it seemed to be composed of darker material than the brighter A and B Rings. Its vertical thickness is estimated at 5 m its mass at around 1.1 kg, and its optical depth varies from 0.05 to 0.12. That