Scientists have long known that Jupiter is a stormy place. But since NASA’s Juno probe reached the solar system’s largest planet last July, they’ve found it to be a far more tempestuous place than they realized.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals unusual magnetism that suggests a convoluted interior
For centuries, scientists have worked to understand the makeup of Jupiter.
With an equator diameter of around 143,000 kilometers, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has 300 times the mass of the Earth. The formation mechanism of giant planets like Jupiter has been a hotly debated topic for several decades. Now, astrophysicists of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS of the Universities of Bern and Zürich and ETH Zürich have joined forces to explain previous puzzles about how Jupiter was formed and new measurements. The research results were published in the magazine Nature Astronomy.
The survey also confirmed the existence of two other moons, whose discovery was announced last year
New research shows the closest-ever views of features in Jupiter’s swirling auroras, revealing the complicated footprints left by its moons Io and Ganymede.
The lightning struck more than twice.
For the first time, a permanent member of our solar system has been found to have originated elsewhere
On June 27, 1996, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft made humanity’s first flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, discovering that it is the only moon known to possess an internally generated magnetic field.
Scientists working on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter shared a 3-D infrared movie depicting densely packed cyclones and anticyclones that permeate the planet’s polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field for any planet beyond Earth.
