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Jupiter – the king of the planets

 

Jupiter is a fifth planet from The Sun and the biggest in solar system. Its name stems from the name of the most important Roman god, which is compared to Greek Zeus. Jupiter gave the name for a group of four objects – the so-called Jovian planets. Those planets have similar chemical composition, structure, a lot of satellites and systems of rings.

Jupiter consists of almost only a gas – 90% makes hydrogen, the most universal gas in the Cosmos, the rest - 10% are helium, methane, water vapour and ammonia. That gas giant needs almost twelve Earth’s years to revolve round the Sun, because its distance from the Sun is five times longer than the Earth’s – 780 mln km. Jupiter is thousand times lighter than our star and over three hundred times heavier than Earth. Jupiter’s mass exceeds two times the total mass of all other planets of the solar system. Its diameter is about eleven times longer than the Earth’s diameter – almost 143,000 km. A day and night at Jupiter lasts fewer than ten hours – it is the shortest time of cycle among the planets in the solar system. Therefore, this globe is flattened on the poles - its polar radius is 4,200 km shorter than equatorial radius.

In March 1979 the Voyager I probe discovered a soft ring of fine matter in an equatorial area. The collision of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet with Jupiter was one of the most important and spectacular astronomical events last years!