Jupiter
Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System, with a diameter of 142,984 km at its equator. It has 79 known moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The planet’s shape is that of an oblate spheroid because of its rapid rotation. Future targets for exploration in the Jupiter system include the probable ice-covered liquid ocean of its moon Europa.
About Jupiter in brief
Jupiter is one of the brightest objects visible to the naked eye in the night sky. It has 79 known moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The planet’s shape is that of an oblate spheroid because of its rapid rotation. Jupiter’s migration went on for around 700,000 years, in a period approximately 2–3 million years after the celestial body started its life as an ice asteroid far from the sun. Earth and its neighbor planets may have formed from fragments of planets after collisions with Jupiter destroyed those super-Earths near the Sun. The latest probe to visit the planet is Juno, which entered into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Future targets for exploration in the Jupiter system include the probable ice-covered liquid ocean of its moon Europa. Jupiter is composed primarily of gaseous and liquid matter. It is the largest planet in the Solar System, with a diameter of 142,984 km at its equator. The average density of Jupiter, 1.326 gcm3, is the second highest of the giant planets, but lower than those of the four terrestrial planets. The atmosphere contains trace amounts of methane, water vapor, ammonia, silicon-based compounds and traces of carbon, ethane, hydrogen sulfide, phosphine and sulfur. Through infrared and ultraviolet measurements, Jupiter’s atmosphere is approximately 75% hydrogen and 24% helium by mass, with the remaining mass consisting of one percent hydrogen and one percent helium. The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries.
A prominent result is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope. In late February 2007, Jupiter was visited by the New Horizons probe, which used Jupiter’s gravity to increase its speed and bend its trajectory en route to Pluto. Astronomers have discovered 717 planetary systems with multiple planets. Regularly these systems include a few planets with masses several times greater than Earth’s, orbiting closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, and sometimes also Jupiter-mass gas giants close to theirstar. The reason behind the actual migration relates to gravitational forces from the surrounding gases in the solar system. Jupiter moving out of the inner Solar System would have allowed the formation of inner planets, including Earth, but the formation timescales of terrestrial planets appear inconsistent with the measured terrestrial composition. The Jupiter system has been explored on a number of occasions by robotic spacecraft, beginning with the Pioneer and Voyager flyby missions from 1973 to 1979, and later by the Galileo orbiter, which arrived at Jupiter in 1995. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter, making its closest approach to the planet on December 4, 1973; Pioneer 10 identified plasma in Jupiter’s magnetic field and also found that Jupiter’s magnetic tail was nearly 800 million kilometers long, covering the entire distance to Saturn.
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This page is based on the article Jupiter published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
