Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, and slightly less than one one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter is the third brightest natural object in the Earth's night sky after the Moon and Venus, and it has been observed since prehistoric times. It was named after Jupiter, the chief deity of ancient Roman religion.
Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen (90% by volume), followed by helium, which constitutes a quarter of its mass and a tenth of its volume. The ongoing contraction of Jupiter's interior generates more heat than the planet receives from the Sun. Its internal structure is belived to comprise an outer mantle of liquid metallic hydrogen, and a diffuse inner core of denser material. Because of its rapid rotation rate of 1 rotation per 10 hours, the planet's shape is an oblate spheroid: it has a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator. The outer atmosphere is divided into a series of latitudinal bands, with turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. The most obvious result of this is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm which has been observed since 1831 and possibly earlier.
Jupiter is surrounded by a faint planetary ring system and has a powerful magnetosphere, the largest contiguous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Jupiter forms a system of 95 known moons and probably many more, including the four large moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Ganymede, the largest of the four, is larger than the planet Mercury. Callisto is the second largest; Io and Europa are approximately the size of Earth's Moon.
Since 1973, Jupiter has been visited by nine robotic probes: seven flybys and two dedicated orbiters, with two more either en route or awaiting launch.
In both the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, Jupiter was named after the chief god of the divine pantheon: Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. The largest of such objects are the eight planets, in order from the Sun: four terrestrial planets named Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, two gas giants named Jupiter and Saturn, and two ice giants named Uranus and Neptune. The terrestrial planets have a definite surface and are mostly made of rock and metal. The gas giants are mostly made of hydrogen and helium, while the ice giants are mostly made of 'volatile' substances such as water, ammonia, and methane.
The tidal force is a gravitational effect that stretches a body along the line towards the center of mass of another body due to a gradient (difference in strength) in gravitational field from the other body; it is responsible for diverse phenomena, including tides, tidal locking, breaking apart of celestial bodies and formation of ring systems within the Roche limit, and in extreme cases, spaghettification of objects. It arises because the gravitational field exerted on one body by another is not constant across its parts: the nearest side is attracted more strongly than the farthest side.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is a rocky planet with the densest atmosphere of all the rocky bodies in the Solar System, and the only one with a mass and size that is close to that of its orbital neighbour Earth. Orbiting inferiorly (inside of Earth's orbit), it appears in Earth's sky always close to the Sun, as either a "morning star" or an "evening star". While this is also true for Mercury, Venus appears much more prominently, since it is the third brightest object in Earth's sky after the Moon and the Sun, appearing brighter than any other star-like classical planet or any fixed star.
Introduction to time-variable astrophysical objects and processes, from Space Weather to stars, black holes, and galaxies. Introduction to time-series analysis, instrumentation targeting variability,
In this course we study heat transfer (and energy conversion) from a microscopic perspective. First we focus on understanding why classical laws (i.e. Fourier Law) are what they are and what are their
Ce cours décrit les composants d'un réseau électrique. Il explique le fonctionnement des réseaux électriques et leurs limites d'utilisation. Il introduit les outils de base permettant de les piloter.
The origin of micrometeorites (MMs) from asteroids and comets is well-established, but the relative contribution from these two classes remains poorly resolved. Likewise, determining the precise origin of individual MMs is an open challenge. Here, cosmic-r ...
We present a sample of 88 candidate z similar to 8.5-14.5 galaxies selected from the completed NIRCam imaging from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science survey. These data cover similar to 90 arcmin2 (10 NIRCam pointings) in six broadband imaging filt ...
We use 0.1 '' observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and JWST to study young massive clusters (YMCs) in their embedded "infant" phase across the central starburst ring in NGC 3351. Our new ALMA data revea ...