Giant Planet: Jupiter

Jupiter, the 5th planet from the Sun, is the largest planet in the Solar System. Jupiter is approximately 60 million years older than Earth, and is the oldest planet in the Solar System at 4.603 billion years old. Recent research has shown that the core of the planet formed approximately 1 million years after the formation of the Solar System.

The name Jupiter comes from the greatest and most powerful god in ancient Roman mythology, the equivalent of Zeus in Greek mythology.

Jupiter is a gas giant, meaning it is one of the planets that is mostly made up of gases. The planets called gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, have a thick atmosphere consisting of hydrogen, helium, ammonia and methane. Jupiter's atmosphere is composed of 90% hydrogen and 10% helium in the outer layers, but the ratios change as you go deeper, consisting of 75% hydrogen, 24% helium and 1% other elements.

So does Jupiter have no solid surface?

Although it is not known for sure that Jupiter, a gas giant, has a solid core made up of iron-nickel alloy and rocks, it is accepted that this core could even be as big as Earth. It is estimated that the temperature in this solid core could be 50 thousand degrees.

Jupiter, which has a probable solid core the size of Earth, is 1,300 times larger than Earth (its mass is 318 times), and is therefore able to hold light gases such as hydrogen and helium under its gravitational pull.

Jupiter is the fastest rotating planet in the Solar System. Its day is only 9 hours and 56 minutes . This rapid rotation causes the poles to be flattened and the equatorial region to appear swollen. The circumference of the Earth at the equator is approximately 40,075 km, and the Earth rotates once in 24 hours, spinning at a speed of 1670 km per hour at the equator. Jupiter, on the other hand, has a circumference of 439 thousand km at the equator and spins at a speed of 44 thousand km per hour.

Jupiter is approximately 778,479,000 km away from the Sun, so its elliptical orbit is quite long, and when you add to this the fact that Jupiter orbits the Sun more slowly than the Earth, a Jupiter year, or one full revolution of the planet around the Sun, is equal to approximately 12 Earth years. (While the Earth rotates at a speed of 29 km per hour, Jupiter rotates at a speed of 13 km per hour)

This speed of the planet also affects the formation of very visible bands in its atmosphere, which are seen as a result of strong winds reflecting complex weather events.

Jupiter is mentioned so much, but the "spot" of Jupiter shown in the photo is a giant storm. It would be a mistake not to mention the Red Eye or Red Spot on the giant planet. This spot seen on Jupiter is actually a storm. The size of the storm is also befitting a giant like Jupiter, it has been going on for exactly 300 years and is twice the size of Earth. This storm is a "permanent storm" and makes one revolution every 6 Earth days (every 14 Jupiter days). More recently, a new storm half the size of the Great Red Spot was observed to have formed. This storm was named the Little Red Spot.

Jupiter has 95 known moons, and satellite exploration began with Galileo Galilei's discovery of the four largest moons in 1610. The inner moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are large and bright, while the others are faint and small. Ganymede is also the largest moon of Jupiter and the Solar System, being larger in diameter than the planet Mercury.

Nine spacecraft have been sent to Jupiter since 1973. The Galileo satellite, which reached Jupiter in 1995 after a 6-year journey, studied the planet until 2003 and was destroyed by being sent into the atmosphere of Jupiter in a planned manner in 2003, making it the first satellite to be placed on an outer planet.