Facts about Jupiter

Did you know that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system? Well it is, and it’s also quite famous too, well not famous like an actor! It is famous for its Red Spot! Read on and find out about this mysterious Red Spot.

Everything you need to know about Jupiter

This famous Red Spot is famous for its raging gas storms, which give it quite an impressive and even frightening and scary look too. It’s also called the ‘Eye of Jupiter’ because of its shape. Not sure that the place of the Red Spot is a journey we want to take!

• Jupiter also has rings, which are similar to Saturn, but you can’t see them all that well. You can only see its rings when Jupiter passes in front of the sun as it lights them up for us to see here down on Earth. There are three rings and they’re called Gossamer, Main and Halo.
• Now this is amazing! Jupiter has over 50 moons. The four largest were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Their names are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Weird names indeed!
• Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar system. It is so massive that more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside it. No way, that is absolutely humongous.

There are thick, colourful clouds that have deadly poisonous gases in them that surround Jupiter. Now those are clouds you won’t want to be near. As the planet spins really, really fast, this whips up the atmosphere and creates bands around the planet. Wow!

If you were to head down into Jupiter, the thin, cold atmosphere, which is made of hydrogen and helium gas, gets thicker and hotter as you go down. It slowly, slowly turns into a thick, dark fog. About 1,000km down the pressure squeezes the atmosphere so hard that it becomes like liquid. It’s actually a liquid metal. Whoa, imagine travelling 1,000km down into Jupiter?

• What lies between the atmosphere and the ocean? Amazingly nothing. It is like a sea without a surface, so you wouldn’t be able to go rowing there! The sky magically becomes the ocean!
• Right in the middle of this raging planet is a rocky core. It’s slightly bigger than Earth, but it weighs 20 times more!
• Around the core is an ocean of liquid hydrogen, about 1,000km deep.
• Jupiter has loads and loads of storms raging on the surface, obviously with that famous Red Spot, which is actually the largest hurricane in our Solar System. It’s been storming around for over three hundred years.

Interesting Facts

• If you were brave enough to put foot on Jupiter, you would weigh two and a half times as much as you would on Earth, because it has a strong magnetic field. Best you pack bigger clothes!
• Jupiter has loads of moons circling around it happily. This is unbelievable; four of these moons are bigger than Pluto.
• What does Jupiter mean? Well Jupiter was known as Zeus in Greek mythology, who over threw his father Saturn to become king of the gods. He then split the universe with his brothers Neptune and Pluto.
• Jupiter is about 749,954,304km from the sun and 588,000,000km from Earth. Those are quite some distances!
• The average temperature in the cloud tops of planet Jupiter is -148⁰C. Wow that’s seriously cold. As you go deeper it then gets seriously hot!
• Eight spacecraft have taken a trip to Jupiter! The Juno Mission is on its way there and will arrive in July 2016! Not too far from now.
• The Red Spot is actually the size of Earth! That is one mighty sized storm.
• Jupiter is like one massive vacuum cleaner. It sucks up all the comets, asteroids and meteorites, which would otherwise head on our way. Thanks Jupiter!
• Jupiter takes 9 hours and 55 minutes to spin on its axis. So this means that a day on Jupiter is less than 10 hours long.
• Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the largest in the whole wide massive solar system.
• This is pretty cool. As Jupiter has heaps of gravity, it is used to catapult space craft on deep space missions further away! That’s how the Voyager missions in 1975 managed to get their work done.

Jupiter is one raging, interesting and surprising planet. Well done, you’re now Jupiter smart…use your knowledge wisely!