Portal:Jupiter

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Jupiter

Cloud bands are clearly visible on Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System and contains nearly 3/4 of all planetary matter.

With no solid surface, Jupiter is a gas and liquid filled giant. Its turbulent belts of clouds circulate parallel to the equator and often contain oval spots which are storm systems with the largest being easily twice the diameter of Earth. The great red spot has been observed for at least 300 years and rotates counter-clockwise with wind speeds of 270 miles per hour [430 km/hr].

Although observed and studied from Earth for centuries it wasn't until the mid 1970's that humans were able to get a closer look with the spacecraft Pioneer 10 and 11. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched with the specific purpose of collecting information and data on the Jovian worlds. In December 1995 the Galileo spacecraft entered into orbit and began it's long-term study of Jupiter and it's moons, a probe was also sent deep into the atmosphere of the gas giant.

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Selected radiation astronomy

Microwaves

Main resources: Radiation astronomy/Microwaves, Microwave astronomy, and Microwaves

File:Jupiter by VLA.jpg

A radio image of Jupiter from the VLA at three wavelengths: 2 cm in blue, 3 cm in gold, and 6 cm in red. Credit: Imke de Pater, Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley), Robert J. Sault (Univ. Melbourne).

"We in essence created a three-dimensional picture of ammonia gas in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which reveals upward and downward motions within the turbulent atmosphere."

"The radio map shows ammonia-rich gases rising into and forming the upper cloud layers: an ammonium hydrosulfide cloud at a temperature near 200 Kelvin (minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit) and an ammonia-ice cloud in the approximately 160 Kelvin cold air (minus 170 degrees Fahrenheit). These clouds are easily seen from Earth by optical telescopes."

"Conversely, the radio maps show ammonia-poor air sinking into the planet, similar to how dry air descends from above the cloud layers on Earth."

"The map also shows that hotspots – so-called because they appear bright in radio and thermal infrared images – are ammonia-poor regions that encircle the planet like a belt just north of the equator. Between these hotspots are ammonia-rich upwellings that bring ammonia from deeper in the planet."

"With radio, we can peer through the clouds and see that those hotspots are interleaved with plumes of ammonia rising from deep in the planet, tracing the vertical undulations of an equatorial wave system."

"We now see high ammonia levels like those detected by Galileo from over 100 kilometers deep, where the pressure is about eight times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, all the way up to the cloud condensation levels."

"We now see fine structure in the 12 to 18 gigahertz band, much like we see in the visible, especially near the Great Red Spot, where we see a lot of little curly features. Those trace really complex upwelling and downwelling motions there."

"Jupiter’s rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe. But we have developed a technique to prevent this and so avoid confusing together the upwelling and downwelling ammonia flows, which had led to the earlier underestimate."

"The pink glow surrounding the planet [in the image on the right] is synchrotron radiation produced by spiraling electrons trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic field. Banded details on the planet’s disk probe depths of 30-90 km below the clouds. This image is averaged from 10 hours of VLA data, so the fine details seen in the other maps are smeared here by the planet’s rotation."

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Selected topic

Trojan asteroids

Main resources: Rocks/Rocky objects/Asteroids/Trojans and Trojan asteroids

Diagram of Lagrange points is in a system where the primary is much more massive than the secondary. Credit: Cmglee.

Def. "the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Sun-Jupiter orbital configuration" are called the Trojan points.

Def. "an asteroid occupying the Trojan points of the Sun-Jupiter system" is called a Trojan asteroid.

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Selected astronomy

Ice astronomy

File:High-flying white clouds above Jupiter.jpg

Photo shows high-flying white clouds above Jupiter. Credit: NASA/SWRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran.{{fairuse}}

"The white clouds [in the center image], which get up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide or so, are high up in Jupiter's atmosphere — so high that they're very cold, and the material they shed is therefore almost certainly frozen."

"It's snowing on Jupiter, and we're seeing how it works."

"It's probably mostly ammonia ice, but there may be water ice mixed into it, so it's not exactly like the snow that we have [on Earth]. And I was using my imagination when I said it was snowing there — it could be hail."

"This photo taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on May 19, 2017, at 5:50 UTC from an altitude of 5,500 miles (8,900 kilometers) shows high-flying white clouds composed of water ice and/or ammonia ice. In some areas, these clouds appear to form squall lines — narrow bands of high winds and storms associated with a cold front."

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Selected deity

Marduk

Main resources: Classical planets/Marduk and Marduk

Marduk and his dragon Mušḫuššu is from a Babylonian cylinder seal. Credit: RuM.

~2800 b2k: The observation of Jupiter dates back to the Babylonian astronomers of the 7th or 8th century BC. To the Babylonians, this object represented their god Marduk. They used the roughly 12-year orbit of this planet along the ecliptic to define the constellations of their zodiac.

Marduk Sumerian: amar utu.k "calf of the sun; solar calf"; Greek Μαρδοχαῖος,

"Marduk" is the Babylonian form of his name.

The name Marduk was probably pronounced Marutuk. The etymology of the name Marduk is conjectured as derived from amar-Utu ("bull calf of the sun god Utu"). The origin of Marduk's name may reflect an earlier genealogy, or have had cultural ties to the ancient city of Sippar (whose god was Utu, the sun god), dating back to the third millennium BC.

By the Hammurabi period, Marduk had become astrologically associated with the planet Jupiter.

Marduk's original character is obscure but he was later associated with water, vegetation, judgment, and magic. His consort was the goddess Sarpanit. He was also regarded as the son of Ea (Sumerian Enki) and Damgalnuna (Damkina) and the heir of Anu, but whatever special traits Marduk may have had were overshadowed by the political development through which the Euphrates valley passed and which led to people of the time imbuing him with traits belonging to gods who in an earlier period were recognized as the heads of the pantheon.

Leonard W. King in The Seven Tablets of Creation (1902) included fragments of god lists which he considered essential for the reconstruction of the meaning of Marduk's name. Franz Bohl in his 1936 study of the fifty names also referred to King's list. Richard Litke (1958) noticed a similarity between Marduk's names in the An:Anum list and those of the Enuma elish, albeit in a different arrangement.

The connection between the An:Anum list and the list in Enuma Elish were established by Walther Sommerfeld (1982), who used the correspondence to argue for a Kassite period composition date of the Enuma elish, although the direct derivation of the Enuma elish list from the An:Anum one was disputed in a review by Wilfred Lambert (1984).

Marduk prophesies that he will return once more to Babylon to a messianic new king, who will bring salvation to the city and who will wreak a terrible revenge on the Elamites. This king is understood to be Nebuchadnezzar I (Nabu-kudurri-uṣur I), 1125-1103 BC.

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Selected image

File:Nhsc2013-014a.jpg

This map shows the distribution of water in the stratosphere of Jupiter as measured with the Herschel space observatory. Credit: Water map: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavali et al.; Jupiter image: NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University).

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Selected meteor

Meteors

Main resources: Radiation astronomy/Meteors and Meteor astronomy

Jupiter seems to be in a transition state between a luminous sun and an opaque world. Credit: Unknown.{{free media}}

Appearance of the sunspots on July 25 is between 1883 and 1884. Credit: Unknown.{{free media}}

"EVERYBODY who watched the sun with a telescope last summer must have wondered at the great belt of spots lying across the southern part of the disk during the last half of July. Several of the spots and groups were of extraordinary size, and their arrangement was very singular. When the belt extended completely across the sun, there was visible at one time almost every characteristic form that sun-spots present. There was the yawning black chasm with sharply defined yet ragged edges, vast enough to swallow up the whole earth, with room to spare, and surrounded by a regular penumbral border as evenly shaded as an artist could have made it; there was the double or triple spot whose black centers, though widely separated from one another, were tangled, as it were, in one twisted and torn veil of penumbra, or connected by long, shadowy bands; there was the monstrous spot of grotesque form surrounded by a crowd of smaller spots of even more fantastic shape, and enveloped in a broad, irregular penumbra as bizarre and wonderful as the mighty sun-chasms inclosed in it; there was the great spot, often of singular outline, accompanied outside its shadowy borders by one or more swarms of minute black specks pitting the white photosphere in the most extraordinary fashion; there was the huge group, visible even to the unassisted eye, and consisting of half a dozen or more large spots intermingled with smaller ones whose number seemed to defy counting, and enveloped in a penumbral cloak of becoming amplitude; there, near the edges of the disk, were the crinkling lines and heaped-up masses of faculæ, the mountainous hydrogen-flames which marked the places where the intensest solar action was going on—in short, there was a panorama in which every variety of sun-spot seemed to be passing in a gigantic procession across the disk. And what a procession it was!—long enough, nearly, to reach from the earth to the moon and back again three times!"

The appearance of Jupiter during sun flare activity is shown.

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Selected moon

Io

Main pages: Rocks/Rocky objects/Io and Draft:Io

This is a true-color image of Io taken by the Galileo probe. Credit: NASA.

Io is a rocky-object that is irradiated by the Sun.

Io is also in a planetary-type orbit around Jupiter.

In the image, "[t]he smallest features that can be discerned are 2.5 kilometers in size. There are rugged mountains several kilometers high, layered materials forming plateaus, and many irregular depressions called volcanic calderas. Several of the dark, flow-like features correspond to hot spots, and may be active lava flows. There are no landforms resembling impact craters, as the volcanism covers the surface with new deposits much more rapidly than the flux of comets and asteroids can create large impact craters. The picture is centered on the side of Io that always faces away from Jupiter; north is to the top."

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Selected theory

Coronal clouds

Main resources: Plasmas/Plasma objects/Coronal clouds and Coronal clouds

Because of an eccentricity of 0.048, the distance from Jupiter and the Sun varies by 75 million km between perihelion and aphelion, or the nearest and most distant points of the planet along the orbital path respectively.

"Favorable oppositions occur when Jupiter is passing through perihelion, an event that occurs once per orbit. As Jupiter approached perihelion in March 2011, there was a favorable opposition in September 2010.

It's orbital period is 4,332.59 d (11.8618 y).

"It is shown that starting with the alignment of Venus with Jupiter at perihelion position, these two planets will perfectly align at Jupiter's perihelion after every 23.7 years".

"The tidal forces hypothesis for solar cycles has been proposed by Wood (1972) and others. Table 2 below shows the relative tidal forces of the planets on the sun. Jupiter, Venus, Earth and Mercury are called the "tidal planets" because they are the most significant. According to Wood, the especially good alignments of J-V-E with the sun which occur about every 11 years are the cause of the sunspot cycle. He has shown that the sunspot cycle is synchronous with the alignments, and J. Schove's data for 1500 year of sunspot maxima supports the 11.07 year J-V-E period average."

"Both the 11.86 year Jupiter tropical period (time between perihelion's or closest approaches to the sun and the 9.93 year J-S alignment periods are found in sunspot spectral analysis. Unfortunately direct calculations of the tidal forces of all planets does not support the occurrence of the dominant 11.07 year cycle. Instead, the 11.86 year period of Jupiter's perihelion dominates the results. This has caused problems for several researchers in this field."

The coronal cloud around Jupiter is exactly opposite to that around the Sun. At the Sun there are polar coronal holes, whereas at Jupiter the coronal cloud is most prevalent over the magnetic poles.

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