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Ten interesting facts about Jupiter

Here is a list of some interesting facts about the planet Jupiter. A planet that catches the attention of all, by its size, storms and its surprising moons.

The mass of Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth. In fact, Jupiter is 2.5 times more massive than all of the other planets in the Solar System combined.

Its gravity is so strong that a rocket would have to go an unthinkable 135,000 mph to leave.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is one of its most familiar features. This persistent anticyclonic storm, which is located south of its equator, measures between 24,000 km in diameter and 12–14,000 km in height. As such, it is large enough to contain two or three planets the size of Earth’s diameter. And the spot has been around for at least 350 years, since it was spotted as far back as the 17th century.

Jupiter’s rings were discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but their origin was a mystery. Data from the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 later confirmed that these rings were created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.

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 System after the heliosphere.

Jupiter has a total of 69 natural satellites. The four largest are: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. However, it is estimated that the planet has over 200 natural satellites orbiting it. Almost all of them are less than 10 kilometers in diameter, and were only discovered after 1975, when the first spacecraft (Pioneer 10) arrived at Jupiter.

Jupiter Has Been Visited 8 Times By Spacecraft. Jupiter was first visited by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft in December 1973, and then Pioneer 11 in December 1974. Then came the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys, both of which happened in 1979. This was followed by a long break until Ulysses arrived in February 1992, followed by the Galileo space probe in 1995. Then Cassini made a flyby in 2000, on its way to Saturn. And finally, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby in 2007. NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently orbiting Jupiter.

Jupiter is the third brightest object in the Solar System, after Venus and the Moon.

Jupiter Is The Fastest Spinning Planet In The Solar System. For all its size and mass, Jupiter sure moves quickly. In fact, with an rotational velocity of 12.6 km/s (~7.45 m/s) or 45,300 km/h (28,148 mph), the planet only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis. And because it’s spinning so rapidly, the planet has flattened out at the poles a little and is bulging at its equator.

Jupiter Cannot Become A Star. Astronomers call Jupiter a failed star, but that’s not really an appropriate description. While it is true that, like a star, Jupiter is rich in hydrogen and helium, Jupiter does not have nearly enough mass to trigger a fusion reaction in its core. This is how stars generate energy, by fusing hydrogen atoms together under extreme heat and pressure to create helium, releasing light and heat in the process.

This is made possible by their enormous gravity. For Jupiter to ignite a nuclear fusion process and become a star, it would need more than 70 times its current mass. If you could crash dozens of Jupiters together, you might have a chance to make a new star. But in the meantime, Jupiter shall remain a large gas giant with no hopes of becoming a star. Sorry, Jupiter!

Sources: universetoday and wikipedia

Images credits: Wikimedia Commons, JAXA, NASA, ESA, Hubble, Wang Letian & Michael Carroll

Mova Globes

LIBRARY OF GALAXY HISTORIES RECONSTRUCTED FROM MOTIONS OF STARS

** Synopsis: The CALIFA survey allows to map the orbits of the stars of a sample of 300 galaxies, a fundamental information to know how they formed and evolved. **

Just like the Sun is moving in our galaxy, the Milky Way, all the stars in galaxies are moving, but with very different orbits: some of the stars have strong rotations, while others may be moving randomly with no clear rotation. Comparing the fraction of stars on different orbits we can find out how galaxies form and evolve. An international team of astronomers has derived directly, for the first time, the orbital distribution of a galaxy sample, containing more than 300 galaxies of the local universe. The results, published in Nature Astronomy, are based on the CALIFA survey, a project developed at Calar Alto Observatory and conceived from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC).

Galaxies are the largest structures in the universe, and scientist study how they evolve to understand the history of the universe. Galaxy formation entails the hierarchical assembly of halos of dark matter (a type of matter that has not been directly observed and whose existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects), along with the condensation of normal matter at the halos’ center, where stellar formation takes place. Stars that formed from a settled, thin gas disk and then lived though dynamically quiescent times will present near circular orbits, while stars with random motions are the result of turbulent environments, either at birth or later, with galactic mergers.

Thus, the motions of stars in a galaxy are like a history book; they record the information about their birth and growth environment, and it may tell us how the galaxy was formed. “However, the motion of each single star is not directly observable in external galaxies. External galaxies are projected on the observational plane as an image and we cannot resolve the discrete stars in it,” says Ling Zhu, researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy who leads the study. “The CALIFA survey uses a recently developed technique, integral field spectroscopy, which can observe the external galaxies in such a way that it provides the overall motion of stars. Thus, we can get kinematic maps of each galaxy.”

The researchers then build models for each galaxy by superposing stars on different types of orbits. By constraining the model with the observed image and kinematic maps, they can find out the amount of stars moving on different types of orbits in each galaxy. They call it the stellar orbit distribution and, for this study, the team has built models for all 300 galaxies, representative of the general properties of galaxies in the local universe.

The maps show changes in galactic orbit distribution depending on the total stellar mass of the galaxies. The ordered-rotating orbits are most prominent in galaxies with total stellar masses of 10 billion solar masses, and least important for the most massive ones. Random-motion orbits unsurprisingly dominate the most massive galaxies (more than 100 billion solar masses). “This is the first orbit-based mass sequence across all morphological types. It includes flourishing information of a galaxy’s past, basically whether it had been a quiet succession of only smaller mergers or shaped by a violent major merger. Further studies are needed to understand the details,” says Glenn van de Ven (ESO).

The researchers had found a new and accurate method of reading off a galaxy’s history – and their survey with its data sets for 300 galaxies turned out to be the largest existing library of galaxy history books.

“This work highlights the importance of integral field spectroscopy and, in particular, of large-scale surveys such as the CALIFA project. The significant contribution of what we call ‘hot’ orbits, a mixture of rotation and random movements of the stellar component, poses important challenges to cosmological models of galaxy formation and evolution,” says Rubén García Benito, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) participating in the project.

CALIFA’s results represent an observationally-determined orbit distribution of galaxies in the present-day universe. They lend themselves thus to direct comparison with samples of cosmological simulations of galaxies in a cosmological context. In this sense, these results open a new window for comparing galaxy simulations to the observed galaxy population in the present-day universe.

Dragon Attached to Station for Month of Cargo Transfers

SpaceX - CRS-13 Dragon Mission patch. Dec. 17, 2017

Image above: The Dragon resupply ship is pictured just 10 meters away from the space station’s Canadarm2. Image Credit: NASA TV. The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft was installed on the Harmony module of the International Space Station at 8:26 a.m. EST. The 13th contracted commercial resupply mission from SpaceX (CRS-13) delivered more than 4,800 pounds of supplies and payloads to the station. Among the research materials flying inside Dragon’s pressurized area, one investigation will demonstrate the benefits of manufacturing fiber optic filaments in a microgravity environment. Designed by the company Made in Space, and sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the investigation will attempt to pull fiber optic wire from ZBLAN, a heavy metal fluoride glass commonly used to make fiber optic glass. Results from this investigation could lead to the production of higher-quality fiber optic products for use in space and on Earth.

U.S. Commercial Cargo Ship Arrives at the Space Station

Dragon is scheduled to depart the station in January 2018 and return to Earth with more than 3,600 pounds of research, hardware and crew supplies. Loaded with some three tons of experiments and supplies, the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft arrived at the International Space Station Dec. 17, where Expedition 53 crew members Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA captured it by using the Canadian-built robotic arm.

Image above: Dec. 17, 2017: International Space Station Configuration. Four spaceships are parked at the space station including the SpaceX Dragon space freighter, the Progress 67 and 68 resupply ships and the Soyuz MS-06 crew ship. Image Credit: NASA TV. Ground controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston took over after Dragon was grappled, sending commands to maneuver the ship to the Earth-facing side of the Harmony module where it was attached for a month-long stay. Dragon was launched Dec. 15 on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to begin its journey to the international outpost. Related links: Debris Sensor (SDS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2145.html Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS): http://www.iss-casis.org/ Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor, or TSIS-1: http://www.nasa.gov/tsis-1 SpaceX: http://www.nasa.gov/spacex Commercial Resupply: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/index.html Expedition 54: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/future.html International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html Images (mentioned), Video (NASA TV), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article