Jupiter is One Crazy Planet

“Now that she’s back in the atmosphere

With drops of Jupiter in her hair,

hey, hey, hey.”   

              Train  “Drops of Jupiter”

No way would any girl want drops of Jupiter in her hair! 

The super-cold hydrogen clouds would freeze her, or the liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding its core mantle would melt her.

But it’s okay to mesmerize her with the sights of Jupiter…just look up at the bright planet Jupiter directly overhead at dark.  The king of the planets is wandering through Gemini Twins, and will be with us through the Spring of 2014.

Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope

With any telescope, the giant planet can be seen as a flattened disk with four, star-like moons surrounding it. Two dark bands and grey polar caps are easy to see, and with a serious backyard telescope the detail is amazing.

Jupiter has three times the mass of all the other planets combined—yet it is 1,000 times smaller than the Sun. To put the gigantic size in another way, every planet, moon and asteroid in the Solar System can comfortably fit inside the globe.

There is probably no solid surface to Jupiter.  Most of the 88,800-mile diameter globe is filled with an exotic mixture of – 100 degrees F. cold liquid hydrogen and helium. 

Deep inside the gravity pressure cooker of Jupiter, there may be an Earth-size rocky or liquid core of metallic hydrogen spinning many times a minute.  This creates an electric dynamo, making Jupiter emit more radiation than it receives from the Sun.

One of the many amazing discoveries by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft from 1995-2003 was the intense radiation belts around Jupiter that electrify the surrounding space to a million degrees hot! 

If we could see this electromagnetic system around the “star” Jupiter when looking up tonight, it would be a circle as big as our Full Moon! The NASA spacecraft Juno is headed to Jupiter to study this incredible, high-energy environment.

      The high-altitude hydrogen clouds we see in a telescope are only 5,000 miles thick at the most, just a fraction of the planet’s 44,432-mile radius.

      These cloud tops are an incredibly cold -230 degrees below zero.  And Jupiter has a thin, ropy ring girdling its equator like a hoola-hoop—first discovered by the 1970s Voyager space craft that NASA sent whizzing by. 

      The official moon count is reaching 70 as small, asteroid-like ones are added by advanced research. 

      The Jovian moons we see in a telescope are the same one’s discovered by Galileo in 1610.  Callisto and Ganymede are icy moons larger than the planet Mercury. 

IO, EUROPA, GANYMEDE & CALLISTO

      Two moons, Io and Europa are active worlds in their own right. Both are about the size of Earth’s own Moon.  Io has at least 30 volcanoes spewing sulfuric material into the inner space of Jupiter. Europa is a prime sign for extraterrestrial life in our Solar System.  Europa’s icy surface is fractured with signs of the liquid water heated underneath the alien surface features. Planetary scientists have lobbied NASA for years to provide funds to send a spacecraft to Europa and probe beneath the ice for life.  

The other moons of Jupiter range in size from 1,000 miles to 10 miles in diameter, many with irregular shapes and different compositions.  Some can be seen in serious backyard telescopes. 

Through even the cheapest backyard telescopes, you can watch the four Galilean moons move from side to side of the planet. The moons pass in front of or go behind planet and disappear for a while.  Sometimes all four moons are one side. This Jovian celestial ballet is predictable for centuries in advance.

Though huge in size, Jupiter’s clouds roar around the globe once every 10 hours on the average.  The rotation is so quick it flattens the planet! And inside the clouds are giant cyclones, like the huge Great Red Spot, three times the size of Earth and visible for more than 300 years.  There are intense electrical storms, and incredible aurora at both magnetic poles.   

THE GREAT RED SPOT

Jupiter is located next to the asteroid belt and its immense gravitational influence actually sucks in passing comets and errant asteroids.

That means that Jupiter is taking hits for the inner planets of the Solar System, our Earth included.  Once a rare event to record, amateur astronomers are now recording two or three hits on Jupiter each year with their automated backyard telescopes and digital video cameras.

Just look around the solid bodies of the Solar System and one sees the damage done by violent impacts that mostly occurred in the first quarter of our 4 billion year existence. 

Our Moon alone has more than 100,000 visible impacts, and the planet Mercury is also densely covered with craters.  Natural erosion on Venus and our Earth has wiped away all but the most recent impacts.  On Mars, its less dynamic atmosphere has allowed many crater impacts to still be visible.

      Just like the dramatic impact scars caused by the 1994 comet collision, something struck Jupiter's backside July 19^th causing a supersonic reaction with the atmosphere that created an energy explosion equivalent to dozens of atomic bombs. 

      Yes, if that cosmic debris had impacted Earth, there would be a global catastrophe no matter whether it hit the land or ocean.

      And right at this moment, there are 1,067 Near Earth Asteroids (NEAR) in orbit about the Sun that could smack into us.  They are being monitored by NASA...we hope!  You can check them out at www.spaceweather.com.

      And you can check out all the amazing spacecraft photos and latest news about Jupiter on many websites, including NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab.