Voyage to Jupiter

CHAPTER 1. The Jovian System

THE JOVIAN SYSTEM

Introduction

In the Sun’s necklace of planets, one gem far outshines the rest: Jupiter. Larger than all the other planets and satellites combined, Jupiter is a true giant. If intelligent beings exist on planets circling nearby stars, it is probable that Jupiter is the only member of our planetary system they can detect. They can see the Sun wobble in its motion with a twelve-year period as Jupiter circles it, pulling first one way, then the other with the powerful tug of its gravity. If astronomers on some distant worlds put telescopes in orbit above their atmospheres, they might even be able to detect the sunlight reflected from Jupiter. But all the other planets—including tiny inconspicuous Earth—would be hopelessly lost in the glare of our star, the Sun.

Jupiter is outstanding among planets not only for its size, but also for its system of orbiting bodies. With fifteen known satellites, and probably several more too small to have been detected, it forms a sort of miniature solar system. If we could understand how the Jovian system formed and evolved, we could unlock vital clues to the beginning and ultimate fate of the entire solar system.

Ancient peoples all over the world recognized Jupiter as one of the brightest wandering lights in their skies. Only Venus is brighter, but Venus, always a morning or evening star, never rules over the dark midnight skies as Jupiter often does. In Greek and Roman mythology the planet was identified with the most powerful of the gods and lord of the heavens—the Greek Zeus; the Roman Jupiter.

As befits the king of the heavens, the planet Jupiter moves at a slow and stately pace. Twelve years are required for Jupiter to complete one orbit around the Sun. For about six months of each year, Jupiter shines down on us from the night sky, more brightly and steadily than any star. During the late 1970s it was a winter object, but in 1980 it will dominate the spring skies, becoming a summer “star” about 1982.

Early Discoveries

Even seen through a small telescope or pair of binoculars, Jupiter looks like a real world, displaying a faintly banded disk quite unlike the tiny, brilliant image of a star. It also reveals the brightest members of its satellite family as starlike points spread out along a straight line extended east-west through the planet. There are four of these planet-sized moons; with their orbits seen edge-on from Earth, they seem to move constantly back and forth, changing their configuration hourly.

In January 1610, in his first attempt to apply the newly invented telescope to astronomy, Galileo discovered the four large satellites of Jupiter. He correctly interpreted their motion as being that of objects circling Jupiter—establishing the first clear proof of celestial motion around a center other than the Earth. The discovery of these satellites played an important role in supporting the Copernican revolution that formed the basis for modern astronomy.

A few decades later the satellites of Jupiter were used to make the first measurement of the speed of light. Observers following their motions had learned that the satellite clock seemed to run slow when Jupiter was far from Earth and to speed up when the two planets were closer together. In 1675 the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer explained that this change was due to the finite velocity of light: The satellites only seemed to run slow at large distances because the light coming from them took longer to reach Earth. Knowing the dimensions of the orbits of Earth and Jupiter and the amount of the delay (about fifteen minutes), Roemer was able to calculate one of the most fundamental constants of the physical universe—the speed of light (about 300 000 kilometers per second).

The four great moons of Jupiter are called the Galilean satellites after their discoverer. Their individual names—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—were proposed by Simon Marius, a contemporary and rival of Galileo. (Marius claimed to have discovered the satellites a few weeks before Galileo did, but modern scholars tend to discredit his claim.) Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are names of lovers of the god Jupiter in Greco-Roman mythology. Since Jupiter was not at all shy about taking lovers, there are enough such names for the other eleven Jovian satellites, as well as for those yet to be discovered.

In the century following Galileo’s death, improvements in telescopes made it possible to measure the size of Jupiter and to note that it bulged at the equator. The equatorial diameter is known today to be 142 800 kilometers, while from pole to pole Jupiter measures only 133 500 kilometers. For comparison, the diameter of the Earth is 12 900 kilometers, only about one-tenth as great, and the flattening of Earth is also much smaller (less than one percent). By measuring the orbits of the satellites and applying the laws of planetary motion discovered by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, astronomers were also able to determine the total mass of Jupiter—about 2 × 10²⁴ tons, or 318 times the mass of the Earth.

Once the size and mass are known, it is possible to calculate another fundamental property of a planet—its density. The density, which is the mass divided by the volume, provides important clues to the composition and interior structure of a planetary body. The density of Earth, a body composed primarily of rocky and metallic materials, is 5.6 times the density of water. The mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth; its volume is 1317 times that of Earth. Thus Jupiter’s density is substantially lower than Earth’s, amounting to 1.34 times the density of water. From this low density, it was evident long ago that Jupiter was not just a big brother of Earth and the other rocky planets in the inner solar system. Rather, Jupiter is the prototype of the giant, gas-rich planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. These giant planets must, from their low density, have a composition fundamentally different from that of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, and Mars.

Jupiter Through the Telescope

Jupiter is a beautiful sight seen with the naked eye on a clear night, but only through a telescope does it begin to reveal its magnificence. The most prominent features are alternating light and dark bands, running parallel to the equator and subtly shaded in tones of blue, yellow, brown, and orange. However, these bands are not the planet’s only conspicuous markings. In 1664 the English astronomer Robert Hooke first reported seeing a large oval spot on Jupiter, and additional spots were noted as telescopes improved. As the planet rotates on its axis, such spots are carried across the disk and can be used to measure Jupiter’s speed of rotation. The giant planet spins so fast that a Jovian day is less than half as long as a day on Earth, averaging just under ten hours.

During the nineteenth century, observers using increasingly sophisticated telescopes were able to see more complex detail in the band structure, with wisps, streaks, and festoons that varied in intensity and color from year to year. Furthermore, observations revealed the remarkable fact that not all parts of the planet rotate with the same period; near the equator the apparent length of a Jovian day is several minutes shorter than the average day at higher latitudes. It is thus apparent that Jupiter’s surface is not solid, and astronomers came to realize that they were looking at a turbulent kaleidoscope of shifting clouds.

Although the face of Jupiter is always changing, some spots and other cloud features survive for years at a time, much longer than do the largest storms on Earth. The record for longevity goes to the Great Red Spot. This gigantic red oval, larger than the planet Earth, was first seen more than three centuries ago. From decade to decade it has changed in size and color, and for nearly fifty years in the late eighteenth century no sightings were reported, but since about 1840 the Great Red Spot has been the most prominent feature on the disk of Jupiter.

It was not until the twentieth century that the composition of the atmosphere of Jupiter could be measured. In 1905 spectra of the planet revealed the presence of gases that absorb strongly at red and infrared wavelengths; thirty years later these were identified as ammonia and methane. These two poisonous gases are the simplest chemical compounds of hydrogen combined with nitrogen and carbon, respectively. In the atmosphere of Earth they are not stable, because oxygen, which is highly active chemically, destroys them. The existence of methane and ammonia on Jupiter demonstrated that free oxygen could not be present and that the atmosphere was dominated by hydrogen—a reducing, rather than oxidizing, condition. Subsequently, hydrogen was identified spectroscopically. Although much more abundant than methane or ammonia, hydrogen is harder to detect.

In the 1940s and 1950s the German-American astronomer Rupert Wildt used all the available data to derive a picture of Jupiter that is still generally accepted. He noted that both the low total density and the observed presence of hydrogen-rich compounds in the atmosphere were consistent with a bulk composition similar to that of the Sun and stars. This “cosmic composition” is dominated by the two simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, which together make up nearly 99 percent of all the material in the universe. Wildt hypothesized that the giant planets, because of their large size, had succeeded in retaining this primordial composition, whereas the hydrogen and helium had escaped from the smaller inner planets. He also used his knowledge of the properties of hydrogen and helium to calculate what the interior structure of Jupiter might be like, concluding that the planet is mostly liquid or gas. Wildt suggested that there probably was a core of solid material deep in the interior, but that much of Jupiter is fluid—extremely viscous and compressed deep below the visible atmosphere, but still not solid. The atmosphere seen from above is just the thin, topmost layer of an ocean of gases thousands of kilometers thick.

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