JUPITER – The Largest Planet | Planets Of The Solar System
JUPITER – In this topic, we will now know things about the fifth planet in the solar system the gas giant Jupiter.
This giant ball of gas is the largest planet in the solar system and is named after the Roman counterpart of the Greek king of the gods, Zeus, fitting for the largest planet.
The planet made a large contribution on how we see the universe way back in 1610, according to Space , when a famous astronomer named Galileo Galilei discovered celestial bodies near the planet.
The bodies are eventually discovered as the planet’s moons, now named the Galilean moons namely:
- Io – the most volcanically active moon
- Europa – a moon with a frozen crust of mostly water ice
- Ganymede – the largest moon and has its own magnetic field
- Callisto – its surface is possibly made of dark, colorless rock.
This also gave a huge support to the view of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Renaissance mathematician, who said that the center of the universe is not the Earth but rather the sun.
The planet’s atmosphere is made of 89.8% hydrogen; 10.2% helum and other trace gasses.
One of the planet’s feature is the Great Red Spot, which is a huge hurricane-like storm which lasted more than 300 years and is twice the size of the Earth.
The orbital period of the planet takes up to 12 years.
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