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Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.A gas giant, Jupiter's mass is more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm) with an orbital period of 11.86 years.
The composition of Jupiter's atmosphere is similar to that of the planet as a whole. Jupiter's atmosphere is the most comprehensively understood of those of all the giant planets because it was observed directly by the Galileo atmospheric probe when it entered the Jovian atmosphere on December 7, 1995.
The first spacecraft to explore Jupiter was Pioneer 10, which flew past the planet in December 1973, followed by Pioneer 11 twelve months later. Pioneer 10 obtained the first close-up images of Jupiter and its Galilean moons ; the spacecraft studied the planet's atmosphere, detected its magnetic field , observed its radiation belts and ...
Impact events on Jupiter. Scar (dark area near Jupiter's limb) caused by a fragment of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. In modern times, numerous impact events on Jupiter have been observed, the most significant of which was the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1994. Jupiter is the most massive planet in the Solar System and thus has a vast ...
The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes visited Jupiter in 1979, discovering the volcanic activity on Io and the presence of water ice on the surface of Europa. Ulysses further studied Jupiter's magnetosphere in 1992 and then again in 2000. The Galileo spacecraft was the first to enter orbit around Jupiter, arriving in 1995 and studying it until 2003.
The outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, compared to the inner planets Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury at the bottom right The four outer planets, called giant planets or Jovian planets, collectively make up 99% of the mass known to orbit the Sun. [h] All four giant planets have multiple moons and a ring system, although only ...
A schema of Jupiter's ring system showing the four main components. For simplicity, Metis and Adrastea are depicted as sharing their orbit. (In reality, Metis is very slightly closer to Jupiter.) The planet Jupiter has a system of faint planetary rings. The Jovian rings were the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after ...
The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by Jupiter's magnetic field.Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun's direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar ...