JUPITER IS THE BIGGEST PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM BY FAR . HERE’S SOME ESSENTIAL FACTS ABOUT OUR COLOSSAL NEIGHBOUR
Introducing Jupiter
As the fifth planet from the Sun, Jupiter is the innermost and largest of four giant worlds that dominate the outer Solar System. With a diameter of 144,000 kilometres (89,477 miles) across the equator, it’s more than 11 times wider than Earth – although a rapid rotation period of just 9 hours and 55 minutes produces a pronounced equatorial bulge where fast-moving material attempts to escape Jupiter’s gravity. While the small rocky planets are all crammed fairly close together, the giants are much more widely spaced – Jupiter’s orbit ranges between 741 and 816 million kilometres (410 and 507 million miles) from the Sun, with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune even more broadly spaced out beyond it. Despite its distance, Jupiter’s sheer size and the brightness of its cloud tops mean that it reflects a great deal of sunlight, allowing it to outshine everything but Venus and the Moon in our skies. Its disc and dark cloud belts are visible even through small telescopes, and the dance of its four largest moons can be traced with binoculars.
The visible surface of Jupiter is mostly ammonia crystals and sulphur, forming swirling clouds.
Jupiter orbits the Sun at an average of 778 million kilometres (485 million miles).
Jupiter is built up of layers. The closer to the core it gets, the denser the layers are.
The mass of Jupiter’s core means that gravity on the planet is 2.4 times that felt on Earth.
This storm on Jupiter’s surface has been raging for at least 350 years and is three times larger than Earth.
The core of Jupiter is an incredibly hot 35,000 degrees Celsius (63,000 degrees Fahrenheit).
90 per cent of Jupiter is hydrogen. Ten per cent is helium, and there’s a tiny smattering of other gases.
It was discovered in 1979 that Jupiter has a ring around it like Saturn, but Jupiter’s ring is much fainter.
Jupiter’s core is composed of rock surrounded by a layer of metallic hydrogen.
Birth of a giant
Jupiter owes its present size and mass to the location where it formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago. It was the fir
