How does jupiter rotates

Europa is one of the likeliest places to find life elsewhere in our solar system. There is evidence of a vast ocean just beneath its icy crust, where life could possibly be supported.

With a radius of 43, If Earth were the size of a nickel, Jupiter would be about as big as a basketball. From an average distance of million miles million kilometers , Jupiter is 5.

One astronomical unit abbreviated as AU , is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes Sunlight 43 minutes to travel from the Sun to Jupiter.

Jupiter has the shortest day in the solar system. One day on Jupiter takes only about 10 hours the time it takes for Jupiter to rotate or spin around once , and Jupiter makes a complete orbit around the Sun a year in Jovian time in about 12 Earth years 4, Earth days.

Its equator is tilted with respect to its orbital path around the Sun by just 3 degrees. This means Jupiter spins nearly upright and does not have seasons as extreme as other planets do. With four large moons and many smaller moons, Jupiter forms a kind of miniature solar system. Jupiter has 53 confirmed moons and 26 provisional moons awaiting confirmation of discovery. Moons are named after they are confirmed. Jupiter's four largest moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — were first observed by the astronomer Galileo Galilei in using an early version of the telescope.

These four moons are known today as the Galilean satellites, and they're some of the most fascinating destinations in our solar system. Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system even bigger than the planet Mercury.

A liquid-water ocean with the ingredients for life may lie beneath the frozen crust of Europa, making it a tempting place to explore. Discovered in by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, Jupiter's rings were a surprise, as they are composed of small, dark particles and are difficult to see except when backlit by the Sun. Data from the Galileo spacecraft indicate that Jupiter's ring system may be formed by dust kicked up as interplanetary meteoroids smash into the giant planet's small innermost moons.

Jupiter took shape when the rest of the solar system formed about 4. Jupiter took most of the mass left over after the formation of the Sun, ending up with more than twice the combined material of the other bodies in the solar system.

In fact, Jupiter has the same ingredients as a star, but it did not grow massive enough to ignite. About 4 billion years ago, Jupiter settled into its current position in the outer solar system, where it is the fifth planet from the Sun.

The composition of Jupiter is similar to that of the Sun — mostly hydrogen and helium. Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system — an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water.

Scientists think that, at depths perhaps halfway to the planet's center, the pressure becomes so great that electrons are squeezed off the hydrogen atoms, making the liquid electrically conducting like metal. Jupiter's fast rotation is thought to drive electrical currents in this region, generating the planet's powerful magnetic field. It is still unclear if deeper down, Jupiter has a central core of solid material or if it may be a thick, super-hot and dense soup.

However, most of the orange disk the middle layers will spill outward, following the white arrows through the red region — leading it back into the blue disk around the star where it started. The fact that the gas is expelled completely out of the disk around the planet makes it possible for the planet to undergo magnetic braking.

In both models, Batygin assumes that Jupiter starts out with twice as large of a radius before gravity causes it to contract to its present-day size in about 1 Myr. He also assumes that the planet starts out rotating at the break-up velocity about 8 hours. Without any slow-down, Jupiter simply speeds up as the planet contracts in order to conserve angular momentum.

But with magnetic braking, Jupiter first spins down to a rotation period of 36 hours in about 25, years. Then, gravitational contraction spins it back up to a rotation period of 9 hours by the time it reaches its current radius — pretty close to its present rotation period of 9 hours and 56 minutes!

Figure 2. Without magnetic braking gold , it rotates at the break-up velocity, which gets faster as the planet shrinks in size. With magnetic breaking blue , Jupiter spins down first, leaving it with about the right rotation period by the time it contracts to its current size. Now that the model in this paper has demonstrated magnetic braking can lead to about the right spin rate for Jupiter and Saturn too , Batygin hopes future work will explore more meticulous aspects of the problem related to magnetohydrodynamics MHD , both with an analytic approach like with the equations in this paper and also simulations which were not used directly in this model.

The astrophysicists living on Jupiter or gas giant exoplanets in other star systems will have plenty more time per day to investigate this problem. And they may have both magnetic fields and how these planets accreted their atmospheres to thank. Email Address. Suggest a Paper Topic! About the Author. These rates are measured by how long it takes for specific storms to come back into view. We have written many articles about Jupiter for Universe Today.

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