I don’t understand why we assume that it protects us. Seems to me that there is an equal chance that asteroids and comets could be nudged inward as well.
The only thing tilting the scale in favor of protection is that some will get caught in Jupiter’s gravity and crash into the planet.
Well said!
Most of the objects which encounter Jupiter get tossed and more often than not leave the Solar System; a much smaller number have their trajectories altered by the big planet such that they will eventually smash into the planet — such was the case with SL9, and probably with this object as well; a tiny fraction wind up encountering Jupiter once or more than once, and their trajectories altered such that they wind up in orbit around it during a future encounter. Jupiter has more than 60 moons, with many of them in retrograde.
Before anyone brings it up as if it’s some kind of cutting criticism, the size of those retrograde moons is entirely beside the point.
Anyway, it’s almost as if the whole thing is a series of random encounters by a inanimate objects. :’)