Jupiter takes it on the chin.

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Jupiter has taken another hit. A new dark bruise in Jupiter's upper atmosphere reveals that an object has recently bashed the giant planet's south polar region. The discovery comes 15 years after fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the planet and created a memorable display of scars, waves and plumes. It's unclear whether the projectile was a comet or an asteroid, says Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., but the size of the scar in Jupiter's atmosphere suggests the body had a diameter of a few hundred meters, similar to that of some of Shoemaker-Levy 9's smaller fragments. Observations following the discovery suggest that the impact came from a single body, not a sequence of objects, as was the case with Shoemaker-Levy 9.