Jupiter is not as huge as we thought
“Textbooks will need updating”: Solar system’s largest planet appears smaller and flatter than we expected
Voyager’s “Blue Movie” of Jupiter.
The largest planet in the solar system is slightly less massive than scientists had estimated. Jupiter, a world large enough to hold 1,000 earthsIts width at the equator is eight kilometers less than previously estimated and 24 kilometers more flat at the poles, According to a new study.
The new measurements have overturned nearly 50 years of consensus about the planet’s size and shape.
“The textbooks will need to be updated,” said Yohai Caspi, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the study’s senior author. statement. “Of course, Jupiter’s size hasn’t changed, but the way we measure it has.”
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Previously, scientists relied on observations sailor And pioneer The spacecraft, which was launched by NASA in the 1970s. But NASA’s Juno mission, which launched in 2011 and reached Jupiter in 2016, has proven to be a game changer: By orbiting Jupiter’s poles for the first time, it allowed clear observations of Jupiter’s shape.
The research means scientists will have to adjust their models of Jupiter, a change that will have dramatic implications both for studying the planet’s characteristics, such as its unstable atmosphere, and for studying how gas giants like Jupiter formed.
“Jupiter was probably the first planet to form in the Solar System,” Caspi said in the same statement, “and by studying what’s happening inside it, we get closer to understanding how the Solar System and planets like us formed.”
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