JUPITER
JUPITER
Named for the king of the Roman gods (in Greek mythology he is Zeus), Jupiter is the largest planet with more mass and greater volume than all the other planets combined.
JUPITER
It is 11 times Earth’s diameter at 139,822km and 1,000 times its volume.
It is 300 times Earth’s mass at 1.898x1027kg.
Rotates once on its axis every 10 hours, faster than any other planet.
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Jupiter is 7.78 x108 km �(778 million km) from the Sun with an orbital period of 12 Earth years.
It is not known whether Jupiter has any solid ‘surface’, however the Juno space probe aims to answer that and many other questions.
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Jupiter has alternating bands of color. The lighter bands are called zones and the darker ones are belts.
The belts and zones rotate around Jupiter in opposite directions due to convection currents in the planet.
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Upwelling ammonia and other gasses cool and condense near the top causing the zones. These ‘boil’ over the sides and change chemically into compounds that are yellow, red, and brown (belts).
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Belts and zones have been known to periodically disappear and reappear.
Turbulence between the zones causes violent storms.
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Getting perspective: The image on the left is as though Jupiter were not spinning, as though you were in a ‘synchronous orbit”.
Getting perspective: The image on the right is as what Jupiter ‘normally’ looks like as it rotates.
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The largest of these storms is the Great Red Spot.
It was first seen in the late 1600s and so has been going at least that long.
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It periodically grows and shrinks, but is always several times larger than the entire Earth.
It has sustained winds of over 500 mph.
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Jupiter’s atmosphere is several km thick. It is mostly H and He with other trace gasses.
As you go deeper into Jupiter’s atmosphere. At some point the pressure is high enough that the H and He are liquid.
Gaseous H
Liquid H
Liquid-Metallic H
??
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Even deeper inside Jupiter the pressure on the gas causes its atoms to share electrons with each other. This is how electric currents work and is generally a property of metals. At this depth the substance is known as liquid metallic hydrogen.
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On July 4, 2016 the Juno probe entered Jupiter orbit to study it gravity, magnetic field, and internal structure.
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Formation Theory 1: In the early solar system several protoplanets formed in the vicinity of Jupiter. These clumped together and accelerated the formation of Jupiter as a giant gas planet. If this is correct, then Jupiter likely has a rocky/metal core.
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Formation Theory 2: Large pockets of H/He collided in the vicinity of Jupiter and the planet grew from there. If so, then Jupiter may have no core at all.
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Because of its rapid rotation Jupiter is slightly flattened. It is 6% wider than it is tall.
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Is Jupiter a failed star?
We’ve seen that the minimum mass needed to begin fusion as ~12% of the Sun’s mass. Jupiter is only 1/1000 of the Sun’s mass.
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Given more time to gather mass within the protostellar cloud it may have grown to be a star, but was cut far short when the Sun ‘turned on’ and the solar wind put an end to planet formation.
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Jupiter emits more heat energy than it receives from the Sun. It is still cooling and radiating heat from its formation.
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This heat helps to drive:�a) the convection which causes the zones & bands, and �b) the storms that arise from that convection (e.g. GRS).
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Jupiter has a very large, powerful magnetic field.
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Jupiter has a very faint ring.
Jupiter’s ring system was discovered almost by accident when Voyager 1 took this photo as it left the Jovian system in March of 1979.
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Due to its large gravity Jupiter is impacted far more often than any other planet.
In 1994 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was broken apart by tidal forces as it passed Jupiter on its way toward the Sun. All of the pieces collided with Jupiter on their way back out of the inner solar system.
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Animation of Shoemaker-Levy-9 �impact.