What if the object that struck a couple of days ago was a fragment
of another shattered comet?
If so then lots of "fresh" icy surfaces would have been exposed, so that even if the comet had been "dead" before being ripped up it should have become quite active - that's how SL9 was discovered.
I've seen a suggestion that the "Bird strike object" might have been a fragment of SL9 that somehow missed in 1994, but this was based on the coincidence of date by the Earth calendar & doesn't seem to have any dynamical justification.
Of course we simply DONT KNOW what the "Bird strike object" was, whether it was single or disrupted recently or long ago, without some pre-discovery images. It is of course worth keeping an eye on Jupiter just incase something else does hit.
