In 1992 a large comet was discovered that had recently been captured by Jupiter’s gravity. Jovian tidal forces had broken it into several pieces
It finally crashed into Jupiter in 1994.
The largest fragment impacted with an energy of 6 million megatons.
For comparison, the Tsar Bomba clocked in at 60 MT.
At the height of the Cold War, humanity possessed about 70,000 nukes.
If they were ALL Tsar Bombas, which of course they weren’t, the total megatonnage would be still just 4.2 million MT.
This is what Jupiter looked like after taking multiple multimillion megaton blasts:
You may notice that the planet is still there. Even the cloud band nearest to the impacts was barely disturbed, and the impact scars themselves were gone in about a week.
Addendum:
As this and related questions have been raised in the comments over the last little bit, here is a list of of examples of what it actually would take to permanently destroy Jupiter.
- A pile of Tsar Bomba nukes with a total mass of at least 4 times that of the moon
- A slug of pure antimatter at least half the mass of the Asteroid Juno.
- 158 years of the combined energy output of the sun
- The explosive power of one half solar mass of TNT (this would, of course, be fully capable of ripping Jupiter apart with gravitational tidal forces without needing to explode at all….)
- The total energy production of Human Civilization (as of 2018) for no less than 65 trillion years
- 9 hours worth of the total energy production of a K3 Galactic Civilization
- And, because in this universe, there is ALWAYS a bigger fish, 0.00000000001% of the total energy of a Type II Supernova.
