Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System.

 Description

It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian or outer planets.The planet was known by astronomers of ancient times and was associated with the mythology and religious beliefs of many cultures. The Romans named the planet after the Roman god Jupiter.When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can reach an apparent magnitude of −2.94, making it on average the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. (Mars can briefly match Jupiter's brightness at certain points in its orbit.)Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium; it may also have a rocky core of heavier elements. Because of its rapid rotation, Jupiter's shape is that of an oblate spheroid (it possesses a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). 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. Surrounding the planet is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. There are also at least 64 moons, including the four large moons called the Galilean moons that were first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these moons, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.Jupiter has been explored on several occasions by robotic spacecraft, most notably during the early Pioneer and Voyager flyby missions and later by the Galileo orbiter. Jupiter's immense atmosphere consists of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by mass (90% hydrogen and 10% helium by number of atoms), with trace amounts of methane, ammonia, and other light substances. The upper atmosphere is striated into wide parallel bands at different latitudes because of a combination of the planet's rapid rotation and extensive convection caused by internal heat rising to the surface. Winds of more than 600 km/h blow in opposite directions in adjacent bands, while slight chemical and temperature differences between the bands are responsible for their different shades of yellow, brown, orange, and red. The light-colored bands are referred to as zones and the dark ones as belts. The zones are at a slightly higher altitude and about 15 K cooler than the belts. The colors of the surface gases are believed to be due in part to the release of phosphorous and the formation of acetylene. The colors correlate with the cloud's altitude: blue lowest, followed by browns and whites, with reds highest. Sometimes we see the lower layers through gaps in the upper ones. An enormous elliptical region in Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt, known as the Great Red Spot, is though to be a centuries'-old cyclone. Other similar but smaller and less long-lived spots have been known for decades. Intense lightning and powerful aurorae are other features of the jovian atmosphere

 History

 Terrain

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 Wildlife

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