Jupiter trivia: 41 facts about the largest planet

Jupiter is one of the largest planets of our solar system and one of the few that we can see in the night sky.

1. Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the solar system.
2. Only the Sun, Moon and Venus are brighter than Jupiter.
3. It is one of five planets visible to the naked eye from Earth.
4. The ancient Babylonians were the first to record their sightings of Jupiter.
5. This was around the 7th or 8th century BC.
6. Jupiter is named after the king of the Roman gods.
7. To the Greeks, it represented Zeus, the god of thunder.
8. The Mesopotamians saw Jupiter as the god Marduk and patron of the city of Babylon.
9. Germanic tribes saw this planet as Donar, or Thor.
10. It is the largest planet of our solar system.
11. Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets.
12. It turns on its axis once every 9 hours and 55 minutes.
13. The rapid rotation flattens the planet slightly, giving it an oblate shape.
14. Jupiter orbits the Sun once every 11.8 Earth years.
15. From our point of view, it appears to move slowly in the sky, taking months to move from one constellation to another.
16. Jupiter has unique cloud features
17. The upper atmosphere of Jupiter is divided into cloud belts and zones.
18. They are made primarily of ammonia crystals, sulfur, and mixtures of the two compounds.
19. The Great Red Spot is a huge storm on Jupiter.
20. The red spot circulates anticlockwise.
21. Jupiter’s storm takes six (earth) days to rotate completely.
22. Another mystery surrounding the red spot is what makes it red.
23. This storm has raged for at least 350 years.
24. It is so large that three Earths could fit inside it.
25. Jupiter’s interior is made of rock, metal, and hydrogen compounds.
26. Below Jupiter’s massive atmosphere (which is made primarily of hydrogen), there are layers of compressed hydrogen gas, liquid metallic hydrogen, and a core of ice, rock, and metals.
27. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system.
28. Jupiter’s moons are sometimes called the Jovian satellites.
29. The largest of these are Ganymeade, Callisto, Io and Europa.
30. Jupiter’s moon Ganymeade measures 5,268 km across, making it larger than the planet Mercury.
31. Jupiter has a thin ring system.
32. Its rings are composed mainly of dust particles ejected from some of Jupiter’s smaller worlds during impacts from incoming comets and asteroids.
33. The ring system begins some 92,000 kilometres above Jupiter’s cloud tops and stretches out to more than 225,000 km from the planet.
34. It’s rings are between 2,000 to 12,500 kilometres thick.
35. Eight spacecrafts have visited Jupiter.
36. Their mission names were Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini, Ulysses, and New Horizons missions.
37. The Juno mission is the most recent and arrived on Jupiter in July 2016.
38. Other future missions may focus on the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, and their subsurface oceans.
39. Jupiter’s surface temperature is around -148°C.
40. 90% of Jupiter’s atmosphere is made of hydrogen.
41. It would be impossible for humans to breathe in its atmosphere.