The Quest for Comets: An Explosive Trail of Beauty and Danger

Levy is a young astronomer's Michael Jordan: he discovers comets where professional astronomers have looked before and found nothing. His 20-odd discoveries are sufficient authority to support this general survey of current theory and comet history. The headliner comet is his 1988 discovery, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, a decaying body due to enter the atmosphere of Jupiter sometime in midsummer 1994. The putative result will be impact explosions on Jupiter, perhaps visible as a flash in earth's night sky. Certainly the ``crash'' of Shoemaker-Levy 9 will create a media frenzy, and Levy here attends to the Armaggeddon questions this event will raise in popular science headlines, in layperson's language, including the comet catastrophe theories. He has created a highly readable version of a planetarium comet program, with comet watchers' astronomy tips thrown in at the end. Levy is entitled to tell the story of Shoemaker-Levy 9, if not the larger role of comet astrophysics, and in any case his successes as an amateur will launch a thousand younger readers' careers in astronomy. Photos. First serial to Science magazine; author tour. (May)