Jupiter is, without a doubt,
one of the most fascinating planets in our solar system. Jupiter is huge.
Mysterious. Colorful. Hypnotizing. And did I say it so big it doesn’t actually
‘orbit’ the sun? Anyway, the gas giant has remained one of the most studied and
revered planets since ancient times.
After the Sun, Jupiter is
the largest celestial body in the solar system, with a mass almost two and a
half times that of the other planets together (with a mass 318 times greater
than that of Earth and three times greater than Saturn), besides being in terms of volume, 1317 times larger than
Earth).
It is also the oldest planet
in the solar system, being even older than the sun; this discovery was made by
researchers from the University of Münster in Germany.
The latest probe to visit
the planet is Juno, which entered into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Jupiter
is the planet with the largest mass in the solar system: it is about 2.48 times
the sum of the masses of all the other planets together.
Despite this, it is not the
most massive planet known: more than a hundred extrasolar planets that have
been discovered have masses similar or superior to Jupiter. Jupiter also has
the fastest rotation speed of the planets of the solar system: it rotates in less
than ten hours on its axis. Altogether, it is one heck of a planet.
The main satellites of the
Planet Jupiter were discovered by the Galileo Galilei on January 7, 1610, which is
why they are called Galilean satellites.
They receive their interesting
names from Greek mythology although, in Galileo’s time, they were mostly
referred to by Roman numerals depending on their very order of proximity to the
planet.
The big discovery of these
satellites constituted a point of inflection in the already long dispute between
those who supported the idea of a geocentric system, that is, with the Earth at
the center of the universe, and the Copernican (or heliocentric system, that
is, with the Sun at the center of the solar system), in which it was much
easier to explain the movement and the very existence of Jupiter’s natural
satellites.
And while I can continue
writing about Jupiter the rest of the day, words can’t describe just how
beautiful the largest planet in our solar system is.
Thankfully, images speak a thousand words so here we bring you some of the most fascinating images of Jupiter taken by the Juno Spacecraft.
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