The solar system's most massive planet, with double the mass of all the other planets put together. The same cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to our Sun and the other planets also gave rise to this enormous globe.
But among the family of our planets, Jupiter was the first-born. Jupiter's strong gravitational field undoubtedly affected the rest of the solar system since it was the first planet.
Jupiter could have had an impact on how the planets lined up in their orbits around the Sun.
It didn't, given that the asteroid belt is a sizable area that, if Jupiter's gravity weren't there, would have been home to another planet.
Additionally, gas giants like Jupiter have the power to launch whole planets into space or spiral back towards their parent stars.
Jupiter was presumably rescued from this fate when Saturn formed millions of years later.
Jupiter may serve as a "comet catcher" as well. Instead of falling into the inner solar system and colliding with solid planets like Earth, comets and asteroids are caught by Jupiter's gravitational field and eventually fall into Jupiter's clouds.
Jupiter may have had the opposite impact on Earth at previous periods in its past, hurtling asteroids in our way. This is normally a terrible thing, but it may also have resulted in water-rich rocks getting to Earth, creating the blue planet we know today.
With its past actually hidden under Jupiter's clouds, Jupiter serves as a window into the history of our own solar system. For this reason, Juno, the spacecraft that is now circling Jupiter, was given that name. Jupiter's mythological wife Juno was able to see through the cloud cover he employed to conceal himself and his wrongdoings.
However, in this instance, we are seeing into our own past via Jupiter's clouds. After travelling for over five years to reach the gas giant, Juno reached Jupiter's orbit on July 5, 2016.
At a speed of 210,000 km/h, Juno entered Jupiter's gravitational well and established one of the fastest speed records ever achieved by a man-made object.
Juno is on a 53-day orbit that is quite eccentric. Juno skims Jupiter at a height of 4,200 km during Perijove, or the closest orbital approach, before sweeping away to 8.1 million miles. The orbit of Juno is tailored to take it over weaker stretches of Jupiter's very strong magnetic field.
Jupiter's magnetic field, which is second in strength only to the Sun, accelerates high-energy particles from the Sun into intense bands of radiation that ring the planet and are capable of frying electronic devices.
In addition to having precise navigation, Juno has radiation-resistant electronics protected by a titanium "radiation vault" that is one centimetre thick and holds its delicate scientific apparatus.
JunoCam, an RGB colour camera that captures visual pictures of Jupiter's clouds while the probe buzzes the planet in about two hours every orbit, spending as little time as possible in Jupiter's radiation, is one piece of technology that astounds everyone here on Earth.
Kevin Gill, a software engineer, planetary and climatic data wrangler, and scientific data visualisation artist, just finished Perijove 29, and he uploaded some of the images.
Kevin has an incredibly amazing Flickr profile where he shares photographs he's processed from missions like Saturn's Cassini and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera as well as images from Juno.
Okay. The ultimate reason you arrived here is: Take a look at Kevin Gill's processing of Juno's Perijove 29. (You can click each image to see their full size).
Kevin's work is also accessible on Instagram (@apoapsys) and Twitter (@kevinmgill).
The main scientific objective of Juno does not truly include JunoCam. However, the camera does serve an important purpose in enabling Juno to take us along for the adventure.
This, in my opinion, is simply amazing. At times, astrophotography is seen more as an artistic endeavour than a scientific one.
But as an amateur astrophotographer, I think these pictures encourage new scientists, raise people's knowledge of current scientific endeavours, and, perhaps, encourage them to support the financing of research. What has science learned about our biggest of all big planets, by the way?
What is in the core of Jupiter is among its biggest mysteries. The community of planetary scientists has been debating how Jupiter evolved, and Juno contributed to settling the issue.
There were two options available: The first is that Jupiter had a rocky core that was around ten times as massive as Earth when it originally formed. The initial rocky globe buried beneath the swirling maelstrom was fashioned into the Jupiter we know today by the gravity of its core drawing in surrounding hydrogen and helium.
The second idea is that eddies in our early solar system's whirling protoplanetary disc collapsed on themselves, causing Jupiter to form directly from them without a rocky core. Different circumstances at the beginning of our solar system are described by each theory. Something stranger—a "fuzzy" or "diluted" centre rather than a solid core—was discovered by Juno.
It seems that Jupiter did originate from a rocky mass, but its core is dispersed throughout the planet's interior, not at the planet's core.
The original core was likely fractured and distributed over half of Jupiter's diameter by a large planet-sized collision with Jupiter, which led to the core's dilution.
Imagine being there as Jupiter swallows a hypothetical planet that has never existed in our solar system. The past of our position in space is revealed.
In addition, we now know that the Great Red Spot is hundreds of kilometres deep and that Jupiter has enormous cyclones at its North and South Poles that are large enough to consume an entire nation.
Currently, after sunset, Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky. Look south if the sky is clear and you can see it!
Remember that bright point is a massive planet that is millions of kilometres distant, hundreds of times the size of Earth, and yet may be one of the most important aspects of your life. By God, that's incredible.
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