Carolyn Shoemaker
The astronomer who began searching the sky in her fifties and discovered more comets than almost anyone, including the one that hit Jupiter.
Key facts
- Born
- 1929
- Died
- 2021
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Astronomer
Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker trained as a teacher and spent many years raising her family while her husband Eugene built his career in planetary geology. In 1980, at the age of 51, she began working with him on a search for asteroids and comets that cross Earth's orbit.
She proved to have a rare gift. At Palomar Observatory in California the team photographed the same patch of sky twice, about 45 minutes apart, and Carolyn examined the pairs of films through a stereo microscope. Any object that had moved between the two pictures seemed to float above the background stars. She spent many thousands of hours at this work.
Carolyn discovered 32 comets and more than 800 asteroids, and for many years she held the record for the most comets found by a single person. Her most famous find, made with Eugene and David Levy in March 1993, was Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, which had been torn into pieces by Jupiter's gravity. In July 1994 the pieces crashed into Jupiter while the world watched.
Searches like hers were the start of planetary defence, the careful mapping of objects that could one day hit Earth. She was injured in the car accident in which Eugene died in 1997, but continued her work and lived to 92.
On the timeline
- 16–22 July 1994A comet strikes Jupiter