Hello my name is Martina and today we're talking about the largest of all the planets Jupiter.
Jupiter is the fifth
planet out from the Sun and it's
the largest out of all of the planets
even if we can squish all the other
planets together Jupiter would still be
twice as massive. So, Jupiter is so big that it's
11 planet Earths wide or you would need around 1,300 Earths to build up Jupiter.
Now Jupiter gets it's name from the Roman god who was the king of all of the gods
the equivalent in other cultures are Zeus and Thor. A day on Jupiter and lasts
just under 10 hours and a year on Jupiter the length of time
to take one whole path around the Sun it's just under 12 years. Jupiter is the first of the gas
giant planets we're gonna be looking at so
it doesn't have any hard ground to land on
it's atmosphere is mostly made up of helium and hydrogen much like a star.
Now there's a reason that Jupiter didn't become a star even though it has a lot
of the same elements as the star and the
reason is it's just not big enough
Jupiter would need to have had a mass seventy times that of what it does now before it could ignite nuclear fusion or
essentially switch on as a star. So Jupiter just isn't big enough.
Now Jupiter is the largest of all the
planets
it also has quite a lot of moons as well  things as well in fact it has 79 moon that we know of so far.
These moons are in orbit around the planet some of them are quite large, some of
them are not very big at all. Jupiter's four largest moons called Io Europa Ganymede and
Callisto and these can be seen through a small telescope in fact the first
telescopes pointed to the night sky by
Galileo in 1610 were able to see these
four moons so Galileo's telescope was
also able to see a Great Red Spot on
Jupiter cloud tops this is a huge storm
that has been raging on Jupiter for
over 400 years so we can still see this
storm today although it has shrunken and
is becoming more circular in shape. Now when we think of rings around
planets in the solar system Jupiter
isn't often the planet that we think of but actually
Jupiter does have its own ring system, in fact all the gas giants do, so we didn't know about
Jupiter's ring system until the
spacecraft Voyager flew past and took an
image from behind Jupiter and we can see this dull ring system just there. So Jupiter
is the fourth brightest object in the
night sky after the Sun, the Moon and Venus
So there's a good chance you've seen Jupiter. Now with the naked eye it does just look like a bright star like
object and at the minute it's out in the
very early hours of the morning. So I
hope you enjoyed finding out more about Jupiter, join us next time were we will be talking all about Saturn.
