From gak@wrs.com Sat Feb 5 01:10:32 1994 Date: Wed, 2 Feb 1994 18:48:54 GMT From: Richard Stueven Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Way Cool Big Fun With Shoemaker-Levy Lifted from the 1/31/94 San Francisco Chronicle's "Back Page" [humor, not science, in case you're wondering]... Way Cool Big Fun With Shoemaker-Levy by Jon Carroll The bad news is that a comet is going to hit a very important planet in our own solar system very soon now. The good news is, it's not our planet. Life will go on much as before, and you will die whenever you are going to die, without heavenly intervention. What a relief! I am not making this up. The comet is called Shoemaker-Levy. It was originally just the Shoemaker comet, but then it married the Levy nebula, and so they became the Shoemaker-Levy comet and the Shoemaker-Levy nebula to indicate that a comet is not automatically required to take a nebula's name just because a nebula is 1 billion times bigger and much more important in the universal scheme of things than a comet, which is just a dirty snowball. One can only hope that the rumors of an unwise liaison with the Crab nebula are untrue. There would not be enough Kwell in the whole universe to handle that particular problem. OK, I made some of that up, but I do wish to emphasize that there really is a comet called Shoemaker-Levy and it really will crash into the southern hemisphere of Jupiter sometime in July and produce an explosion similar in size and power to the one that took out all the dinosaurs on Earth a while back. Alas, the comet is going to crash into the back side of Jupiter, the night side, the side away from the sun and the Earth and responsible scientists. This is very sad. If you don't get to see the coolest explosion in the whole solar system in this century, what's the point of being a responsible scientist? But there's hope. The astronomers may not be able to see the explosion itself, but they'll be able to see the light from the explosion reflected off the moons of Jupiter, and that should be pretty cool. And, of course, very useful. Responsible scientists have a hard time admitting that they just want to watch things blow up because it's aesthetically pleasing, so they usually decide to measure the event and then quantify it and compare it to other known events. That's why it's science and not voyeurism. The atmosphere in a lot of labs resembles the atmosphere in a lot of Cub Scout meeting rooms. Yes, there's the fine intellectual challenge of figuring out the something or other that might explain the origins of the univers (billions and billions; as Carl Sagan demonstrated, that's just a lot of fun to say), but also there's sitting around eating corn chips and raisin-flecked muffins and thinking about an explosion big enough to wipe out Europe. Sometimes, if you listen to an astronomer muttering under his breath, you can hear him say, "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee BOOM!" And when the big day comes, when Shoemaker-Levy actually smashes into Jupiter and the radiance of the impact hits the moons of Jupiter and then the telescopes staffed by responsible scientists, you know what they'll do? They'll applaud. Good show, God! They understand that God is a Cub Scout too. There is nothing cooler than the universe. Exploding stars! Expanding galaxies! Continual thermonuclear explosions at the heart of every star! The almost total vacuum of space! You know what happens to a human body when it's suddenly put into an almost total vacuum? I'm not going to describe it here, but it's very cool. So when you get something with the sheer cosmic swagger of Shoemaker-Levy, the Death Comet, then the juices really start flowing. If only we could prove that there was something that swallowed solid hydrogen for breakfast living at the very center of Jupiter, something that was imperiled by the onrushing inevitability of Shoemaker-Levy, then that would be just the neatest, greatest, uh, saddest, most distressing thing ever. Go nuts, big guy! We'll be there, grinning like crazy, grinning and of course measuring. --- Richard Stueven gak@wrs.com attmail!gakhaus!gak 209/15/19&20 Hockey isn't a life or death thing. It's far more important than that. - Kevin Constantine