Jupiter is the most interesting object in the solar system. This giant ball of gas is a thousand times larger than the Earth in volume and about three hundred times in mass. Most likely, it does not have a solid surface. As the most massive body in our system after the Sun, Jupiter has the greatest impact on other planets and asteroids.
As the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus, Jupiter has attracted the attention of people since ancient times. In many cultures, Jupiter has become an object of religious worship. The ancient Arabs and Jews, prior to the emergence of a monotheistic worldview, associated Jupiter with the god of luck - Gaddi. The Chinese and Hindu pantheons also have deities associated with Jupiter. Actually, the very name "Jupiter" means the supreme deity of ancient Roman mythology. According to astrologers, Jupiter is the "king of the planets" and symbolizes power and luck.
But, let's leave mysticism and consider Jupiter from the point of view of science. It must be said that few celestial bodies aroused so much enthusiasm among researchers and discovered such a large number of previously unknown and significant phenomena as Jupiter.
Actually, Jupiter was the first planet to have satellites discovered. The first satellites of the planets (except for the Moon, of course) were discovered by Galileo at the beginning of the 17th century; they are called "Galilean satellites of Jupiter". In the future, these satellites puzzled researchers no less than Jupiter itself. All in all, Jupiter has almost 70 satellites - an absolute record in the solar system; 14 of them were discovered using observations from the Earth, the rest - thanks to the use of spacecraft.
Despite its huge size, Jupiter rotates very quickly. In less than 10 hours, it makes a complete revolution around its axis. Such a tremendous speed of rotation creates colossal winds and storms in Jupiter's atmosphere. Hurricanes are raging in it, lightning flashes, and, possibly, it rains from the concentrated gas that makes up the atmosphere. The scale of Jupiter's storms is such that the dimensions of vortices and cyclones exceed the dimensions of the Earth in diameter, and their lifetime is measured not in weeks, as in our country, but in years and decades.
Weather phenomena in the atmosphere of Jupiter are so grandiose that they have proper names. For more than three hundred years, a giant hurricane has been observed in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter - the so-called Great Red Spot. Its size is several times the size of the Earth. In addition to this hurricane, there are several others with smaller sizes. One of them is called the Lesser Red Spot, the other is the White Oval. In all these hurricanes, lightning discharges occur, in terms of power tens of thousands of times higher than the earth's.
Jupiter is the only planet in the solar system that itself emits more energy than it receives from the sun. The monstrous force of gravitational compression releases an enormous amount of heat, and the high speed of rotation, leading to an electrifying atmosphere, creates a powerful magnetosphere and radiation belts around Jupiter. Absolutely all spacecraft sent to Jupiter received gigantic doses of radiation, tens of times higher than the lethal doses for humans.
There is an opinion among scientists that if Jupiter was several dozen times more massive, it would become a star. There are many brown dwarfs in the universe, the composition of which is the same as that of Jupiter. It is quite possible that the concentration of the gas and dust cloud from which the solar system was formed was distributed a little differently, we would have not one, but two Suns in our sky. Naturally, in this case, the evolution of the Earth and life on it could follow a completely different path.
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The huge mass of Jupiter makes it the main reason for the appearance of comets in our sky. Jupiter's gravitational influence "pulls" comets out of their permanent habitat - the so-called "Oort Clouds"; comets rush towards the Sun, and by no means all come back to the Cloud. Some comets are attracted by the Sun and fall on it, however, most of them end up in Jupiter's atmosphere.
A similar scenario seemed incredible 30 years ago, however, the observation in 1994 of the death of comet Shoemaker-Levy in the atmosphere of Jupiter was the first evidence of this theory. Later, for about 20 years, about five cases of the death of planets in the atmosphere of Jupiter were recorded. Thus, the number of comets destroyed by Jupiter during its entire existence exceeds several million! And who knows, perhaps the appearance of water on Earth, and, accordingly, life, was caused by the fall of a giant comet on it, pulled out by Jupiter from its "dream" in the Oort Cloud. How can one not be surprised at the sagacity of the ancients, who gave Jupiter the name of the supreme deity …
Each of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter is a unique phenomenon that is not repeated anywhere else in our system. There are many active volcanoes on the surface of Io, the eruptions of which have been observed more than once from spacecraft that have explored the vicinity of Jupiter. Europe is completely covered with a thin layer of ice, under which is a giant ocean, about a hundred kilometers deep. Ganymede is the largest satellite in the solar system in general. Callisto has a strong magnetic field so strong that it distorts the magnetic field of Jupiter in its vicinity. Scientists are seriously considering the possibility of primitive life in the oceans located on Europa and Callisto. All Galilean satellites always face Jupiter with the same side, as the Moon faces the Earth.
Jupiter has always attracted the attention of the inhabitants of the Earth. Almost all studies of the solar system beyond Mars necessarily included the flyby of spacecraft near Jupiter: from the Pioneer series vehicles to the newest stations of the New Frontiers program. Each series of studies opens up more and more new boundaries of knowledge, and who knows what will be discovered in the near future …