WHAT IS CAUSING JUPITER’S ENERGY CRISIS?

If you were hoping for a warm and inviting holiday on a planet in the Solar System, you’d generally look to avoid Jupiter. After all, it’s a long-haul journey at five times the distance from the Sun as Earth, some 778 million kilometres (484 million miles). It also takes 43 minutes for sunlight to travel there; not ideal if you’re hoping to lay on a sunlounger and soak up the rays, you would assume. And that’s what astronomers thought too. “Jupiter’s upper atmosphere should be about -110 degrees Celsius (-166 degrees Fahrenheit) based on the amount of heating imparted to it by sunlight,” affirms James O’Donoghue of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. But as O’Donoghue and scores of other astronomers know only too well, that isn’t the case in reality.

JUPITER BY NUMBERS

90%

Percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere

10%

Percentage of helium in the atmosphere

20,000x

Jupiter’s magnetic field is more powerful than Earth’s

426°C

The temperature within Jupiter’s thermosphere

9.9

Time taken, in hours, for the planet to rotate

79