Provenance of the organic debris clouds on jupiter due to the impact of comet shoemaker levy 9
Cometary impact has been often proposed as an important source of organics on the early Earth. What is less clear is the survivability of cometary organics during impact (Chyba et al. 1990) The remarkable impacts of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 with Jupiter in July, 1994 produced Earth sized, organic rich scars in Jupiter's atmosphere, thus providing an ideal opportunity to assess the processes of destruction and reformation of cometary organics during an impact. Jupiter's strongly reducing composition complicates the interpretation because shock processing of the atmosphere can also synthesize organic molecules. The brown impact debris clouds were composed of particles 0.2 microns in size, with an imaginary index of refraction .01 to 0.1 for wavelengths between 200 to 1000 nm (West et al. 1995) The most likely interpretation of these particles is that they were organic rich, with 10 C by mass. Spectroscopic observations of the impact sites over a wide range of wavelengths revealed the presence of many unusual (for Jupiter's stratosphere) C,S, and N compounds, suggesting that the debris cloud particles were probably composed of a complex suite of organics.
Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere