Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. It’s so large that all of the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it. If we really paid attention to the sky, we’d do nothing but freak out that there’s a giant, terrifying, stormy orb of pressure and gas up there. Mental Floss spoke about Jupiter with an expert: Barry Mauk, the lead investigator of the JEDI instrument on the Juno spacecraft, which entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016 to conduct the most in-depth scientific analysis of the planet ever. Mauk is a principal staff physicist at the Johns Hopkins UniversityApplied Physics Laboratory, which built JEDI. Here’s what you need to know about Jupiter.
1. JUPITER IS REALLY, REALLY BIG.
Thirteen hundred Earths could fit inside of Jupiter, like a big celestial gumball machine. It’s big, OK? And its powerful magnetosphere is even bigger—bigger, in fact, than the Sun, a fact made even more astounding when you consider that the Sun could hold a thousand Jupiters.
The amount of time it takes Jupiter to rotate on its axis is known as a Jovian day (Jove is another name for Jupiter in Roman mythology). It only takes about 9.9 hours, but a Jovian year is 4333 Earth days long.
Jupiter is about 5.2 astronomical units from the Sun, compared with Earth’s 1 AU. As such, it takes sunlight about 43 minutes to reach Jupiter. The planet has a lot of moons, too: 69 of them, and that number is still growing. (Two of those moons were discovered just this summer.) Those moons are good news for the future of the planet’s exploration, as they might provide a landing surface. Jupiter isn’t an option because it is a giant ball of gas with no surface that we know of—or at least, no surface that is…