Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team and NASA

When George Hall, an amateur astronomer in Dallas, went to bed on September 9, 2012, he didn’t know that the telescope he had left trained on Jupiter would, in the wee hours of the morning, capture the telltale signs of an interstellar object crashing onto the planet’s gassy surface. After he released the video on his website and news of it spread, some journalists proclaimed that Jupiter had taken another bullet for the Earth, ensuring our planet’s habitability.