10 Interesting Facts About Jupiter (The Largest Planet!!!)

Named after the Roman king of the gods, Jupiter is fitting of its name. With a mass of 1.90 x 1027 kg and a mean diameter of 139,822 km, Jupiter is easily the largest and most massive planet in the Solar System. To put this in perspective, it would take 11 Earths lined up next to each other to stretch from one side of Jupiter to the other and it would take 317 Earths to equal the mass of Jupiter.

Jupiter is like a star in composition. If Jupiter had been about 80 times more massive, it would have become a star rather than a planet. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun. Jupiter's average distance from the sun is 5.2 astronomical units, or AU. This distance is a little more than five times the distance from Earth to the sun. When viewed from Earth, Jupiter is usually the second brightest planet in the night sky, after Venus.

Interesting Facts about Jupiter:

The first recorded sighting of Jupiter were by the ancient Babylonians in around 7th or 8th BC. 

It is named for Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods and god of the Sky. The Greek equivalent is Zeus, god of thunder. For the Mesopotamians, he was the god Marduk and patron of the city of Babylon. Germanic tribes saw the planet as Donar, also known as Thor.

Jupiter has the shortest day of the eight planets

Jupiter rotates very quickly, turning on its axis once every 9 hours and 55 minutes. This rapid rotation is also what causes the flattening effect of the planet, which is why it has an oblate shape.

One orbit of the Sun takes Jupiter 11.86 Earth years

Jupiter takes 12 Earth years to make one revolution around the sun, so one year on Jupiter is equal to 12 years on Earth. This means that when viewed from Earth, the planet appears to move very slowly in the sky. It takes months for Jupiter to move from one constellation to the next.

Jupiter has at least 67 moons in satellite around the planet

Jupiter has 67 confirmed moons orbiting the planet. These moons are separated into three groups:

1. Inner moons. These orbit the closest to Jupiter and are sometimes called the Amalthea group. The names of the inner moons of Jupiter are Metis, Adrastea, Amalthea, and Thebe.
2. Galilean moons. These are largest of Jupiter’s moons and were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610 – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
3. Outer moons. These moons are much smaller and further away from Jupiter. They also have irregular, elliptical orbit paths and many are captured asteroids.

The largest of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system

The moons are sometimes called the Jovian satellites and the largest of them are Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury with a diameter of around 5,268 km.

Jupiter has an extremely powerful magnetic field, like a giant magnet

On Earth, hydrogen is usually gas. But on Jupiter, the pressure is so great inside its atmosphere that the gas becomes liquid. As Jupiter spins, the swirling, liquid metal ocean creates the strongest magnetic field in the solar system.

The Great Red Spot is a huge storm on Jupiter

The red spot is a huge storm that has been continuously going on Jupiter for over 400 years.  Winds inside this storm reach speeds of about 270 mph.  The red spot of Jupiter is the biggest, most violent storm in the known universe, that spot is at least three times the size of earth!

Jupiter’s interior is made of rock, metal, and hydrogen compounds

Below Jupiter’s massive atmosphere (which is made primarily of hydrogen), there are layers of compressed hydrogen gas, liquid metallic hydrogen, and a core of ice, rock, and metals.

Jupiter has a thin ring system

Its rings are composed mainly of dust particles ejected from some of Jupiter’s smaller worlds during impacts from incoming comets and asteroids. The ring system begins some 92,000 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops and stretches out to more than 225,000 km from the planet. They are between 2,000 to 12,500 kilometers thick.

Eight spacecraft have visited Jupiter

Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini, Ulysses, and New Horizons missions. The Juno mission is its way to Jupiter and will arrive in July 2016. Other future missions may focus on the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, and their subsurface oceans.