Question....If Jupiter is a gas giant, why were we able to see an impact when the comet/meteor hit it in 1993. I understand that it would have hit gases that might have made it explode deep in the atmosphere, but the videos you see make it seem like it hit a hard surface. Surely it would have traveled mile into the atmosphere before it exploded. So is Jupiter a gas giant?

The basic answers are that, Yes, Jupiter is a gas giant and that the reason the impacts were so violent and easily visible was due to the comet fragments velocities.

Those fragments were traveling at what we call cosmic velocity: thousands, to tens of thousands, of kilometers per second. To put this in perspective, the speed of sound near sea level is a bit more than 2,000 kilometers per hour (and therefore almost 4,000 times slower than cosmic velocities).

If you take a body composed of rock and ice and smack it into a gas at cosmic velocities, it will create quite a bang.

You might be interested in this analysis (click that).

That was a very interesting article chipdatajeffB. Thanks for offering it.