You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Reinhard, I’m no scientist by any means, but I seem to think that if Jupiter went solar, Europa would be too close and fry. In fact I think they all would.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER, USE THEM IN PEACE.

Speaking of, reading this discussion of the phenomenon on Boing Boing yesterday, there was a link in the comments to a fascinating article on whether it would actually be possible given known physics for an advanced civilization to stellify Jupiter, and whether such an act could lead to a result like 2010, a comfortable warming for Europa for the next several million years without also destroying Earth.

The BoingBoing link also relates to your question Matt. Looks like this event was first spotted by an amateur astronomer. The only reason NASA “knew in advance” about the Shoemaker-Levy impact was because the pre-impact comet has been discovered by its eponymous observers a year or so earlier, and orbit calculations showed that it had been in a capture orbit around Jupiter and would come around again and impact in 1994. The initial discovery was basically an accident, having been stumbled across during an observation program to detect near-Earth objects (not near-Jupiter objects). Having this advance warning (accidental or not) was very useful because it meant all sorts of observations could be ready ahead of time to get good pictures and do spectrographic analyses of the ejecta thrown up in the Jovian atmosphere afterward.

This time nobody happened to luck into stumbling across the impacting object ahead of time.

NASA saw the 1994 comet impact months ahead of time. How did this one sneak in?