Jupiter Size report
Jupiter is the fifth closest planet to the sun and the largest planet in the solar system, with 79 known moons as of 2019. The ancients had known this planet for a long time, and the Romans named it after the main god Jupiter. Jupiter is the third brightest celestial body in the night sky on Earth after the Moon and Venus.
Humans have never stopped exploring the planets of the solar system. Early flybys of Jupiter included Pioneer and Voyager, and later Galileo and Juno orbiting Jupiter and New Horizons, which used Jupiter's gravitational acceleration to fly to Pluto. There will still be many space missions to explore the Jupiter system in the future.
Jupiter is beloved by stargazers for its colorful stripes as one of the easiest celestial bodies to observe with the naked eye. When the local sun, the Earth, and Jupiter move in nearly a straight line in their respective orbits, Jupiter is the closest to the Earth and the brightest. You will learn more about Jupiter by reading the following post.
Jupiter Descriptions
Jupiter is one of the brightest planets in our sky and the largest in size and mass in the solar system. Jupiter is a giant planet, one-thousandth the mass of the sun but 2.5 times the mass of the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter is so big because it is the oldest planet in our Solar System. It formed around one million years after the Solar System. Jupiter is a massive liquid hydrogen star. With increasing depth, liquid hydrogen is formed under high pressure and high temperature at a depth of 5,000 kilometers from the surface.
Due to its rapid rotation, Jupiter has an oblate spheroid appearance. Jupiter's surface has colorful stripe patterns such as red, brown, and white. It can be speculated that the wind direction in Jupiter's atmosphere is parallel to the equator. There are also faint planetary rings and a strong magnetosphere surrounding Jupiter, including four Galilean moons discovered in 1610, and 79 moons have been discovered as of December 2019. Ganymede is the largest, with a diameter larger than the planet Mercury.
Qucik Basics
Radius | 71,492 km |
Polar radius | 66,854 km |
Mass | 18.98 × 1026 kg |
Density | 1.326g/cm³ |
Distance from Sun | 778,340,821 km (5.2 AU) |
Eccentricity of orbit | 0.048 |
Planetary ring system | 1 main ring; 3 less-dense components |
Orbital velocity | 13.1 km/s |
Rotation period | less than 10 Earth days |
Number of known moons | 79 |
Diameter, Radius, And Volume
- Jupiter has a diameter of around 142.984 km / 88.846 mi at the equator and about 133.708 km / 83.082 mi at the poles. Jupiter has more than 11 times the diameter of Earth.
- It has a mean radius of 69.911 km / 43.440 mi.
- The volume of Jupiter is 1.43128×1015 km³. That is enough to fit inside 1321 planets the size of Earth and still have room left over.
Density, Mass, And Distance
- Jupiter's density is 1.326g/cm³, ranking second among the gaseous planets but far lower than the four terrestrial planets in the solar system.
- The mass of Jupiter is 1.8986×1026 kg. Jupiter has 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the solar system, and it is so massive.
- The common center of mass of Jupiter and the sun is 1.07 solar radii away from the center of the sun. The average distance from Jupiter to the sun is 778 million kilometers, and it takes 11.8 Earth years to orbit the sun once.
Orbit And Rotation
Jupiter's rotation is the fastest of all the planets in the solar system, completing one rotation on its axis in less than 10 hours; this creates an equatorial bulge that can be easily seen with a small amateur telescope on Earth.
World records
There are nine spacecraft that have visited Jupiter since 1973. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with the shortest day and visited by the most spacecraft and the planet with the most Trojan asteroids. Jupiter has the strongest auroras, the most active volcanoes, the largest anticyclonic storms, and the densest moons in the solar system.