How is jupiter

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. It could be up to 90, degrees Fahrenheit 50, degrees Celsius down there, made mostly of iron and silicate minerals similar to quartz.

The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids. The extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet crush, melt, and vaporize spacecraft trying to fly into the planet. Jupiter's appearance is a tapestry of colorful cloud bands and spots. The gas planet likely has three distinct cloud layers in its "skies" that, taken together, span about 44 miles 71 kilometers.

The top cloud is probably made of ammonia ice, while the middle layer is likely made of ammonium hydrosulfide crystals. The innermost layer may be made of water ice and vapor. The vivid colors you see in thick bands across Jupiter may be plumes of sulfur and phosphorus-containing gases rising from the planet's warmer interior. The atmosphere of Jupiter is 90 percent hydrogen. The remaining 10 percent is almost completely made up of helium, though there are small traces of other gases inside.

These gases pile on top of one another, forming layers that extend downward. Because there is no solid ground, the surface of Jupiter is defined as the point where the atmospheric pressure is equal to that of Earth. At this point, the pull of gravity is almost two and a half times stronger than it is on our planet. Trying to stand on that surface would be impossible, since it is simply another layer of gases.

Spacecraft and astronauts would only sink into the mire. Once an embryo became about as massive as ten Earths, its self-gravity became strong enough to pull in gas directly from the disk. During this second step, the proto-Jupiter gained most of its present mass a total of times the mass of the Earth. Soon thereafter, the disk gas was removed by the intense early solar wind, before Saturn could grow to a similar size.

Brown dwarfs lack sufficient mass to shine, so they might more fairly be described as "failed stars. It is interesting to note, however, that more than half of all stars in the sky are part of a binary, triple, or higher multiple star system binaries being the most common.

So the Sun is unusual in being a loner. Stellar formation is a hot topic of current research, as astronomers are trying to fathom the still-mysterious details of the birth process. Sign up for our email newsletter. While previous simulations, both large and medium-sized objects consumed their pebble-sized cousins at a relatively constant rate, Levison's simulations suggest that the larger objects acted more like bullies, snatching away pebbles from the mid-sized masses to grow at a far faster rate.

Originally, scientists thought that planets formed around the same place they live today. The discovery of exoplanets revealed that, around other stars at least, some worlds moved from their natal neighborhood. These worlds couldn't have formed in place, because temperatures were too high for them to collect hydrogen and helium. Scientists quickly concluded that at least some gas giants in the universe migrated in. At the same time, the solar system suffered from what many call 'the small Mars problem.

Instead, the created a much smaller world in the Martian orbit. In , scientists unveiled the Grand Tack model. In the new model, Jupiter moves inward toward the sun, scattering material in front of it. Eventually, it travels in to where Mars travels today, a distance of about 1. Left alone, Jupiter might have plowed through the inner solar system. Walsh and his colleagues found that including Saturn as a traveling buddy caused Jupiter to reverse in its tracks, like a sailboat tacking in the wind.

Both planets eventually returned to the outer solar system and settled into their current orbit. Because the massive planet formed so early in the history of the solar system, it most likely impacted the creation and paths of other planets. The planet itself would have had sufficient mass to alter the path of other baby planets that traveled near it, sending them veering either into the outermost reaches of the solar system or toward a fiery death near the sun.

Comets and asteroids could have been similarly cast out. Jupiter is often lauded as a shield for Earth, but that may not have always been the case.