What kind of orbit does jupiter have

The place where the planet is closest to the Sun helios in Greek and moves the fastest is called the perihelion of its orbit, and the place where it is farthest away and moves the most slowly is the aphelion.

For the Moon or a satellite orbiting Earth gee in Greek , the corresponding terms are perigee and apogee. In this book, we use the word moon for a natural object that goes around a planet and the word satellite to mean a human-made object that revolves around a planet. We know eight planets, beginning with Mercury closest to the Sun and extending outward to Neptune. The average orbital data for the planets are summarized in Table 1. Ceres is the largest of the asteroids, now considered a dwarf planet.

At the opposite extreme, Neptune has a period of years and an average orbital speed of just 5 kilometers per second. All the planets have orbits of rather low eccentricity. The most eccentric orbit is that of Mercury 0. It is fortunate that among the rest, Mars has an eccentricity greater than that of many of the other planets. 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.

Jupiter's fast rotation — spinning once every 10 hours — creates strong jet streams, separating its clouds into dark belts and bright zones across long stretches. With no solid surface to slow them down, Jupiter's spots can persist for many years. Stormy Jupiter is swept by over a dozen prevailing winds, some reaching up to miles per hour kilometers per hour at the equator. The Great Red Spot, a swirling oval of clouds twice as wide as Earth, has been observed on the giant planet for more than years.

More recently, three smaller ovals merged to form the Little Red Spot, about half the size of its larger cousin. Anticyclones, which rotate in the opposite direction, are colder at the top but warmer at the bottom.

The findings also indicate these storms are far taller than expected, with some extending 60 miles kilometers below the cloud tops and others, including the Great Red Spot, extending over miles kilometers.

This surprising discovery demonstrates that the vortices cover regions beyond those where water condenses and clouds form, below the depth where sunlight warms the atmosphere.

With their gravity data, the Juno team was able to constrain the extent of the Great Red Spot to a depth of about miles kilometers below the cloud tops. Belts and Zones In addition to cyclones and anticyclones, Jupiter is known for its distinctive belts and zones — white and reddish bands of clouds that wrap around the planet.

Strong east-west winds moving in opposite directions separate the bands. Juno previously discovered that these winds, or jet streams, reach depths of about 2, miles roughly 3, kilometers. Researchers are still trying to solve the mystery of how the jet streams form.

But at deeper levels, below the water clouds, the opposite is true — which reveals a similarity to our oceans. Over time, mission scientists determined these atmospheric phenomena are extremely resilient, remaining in the same location. Juno data also indicates that, like hurricanes on Earth, these cyclones want to move poleward, but cyclones located at the center of each pole push them back.

This balance explains where the cyclones reside and the different numbers at each pole. The Jovian magnetosphere is the region of space influenced by Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. It balloons , to 2 million miles 1 to 3 million kilometers toward the Sun seven to 21 times the diameter of Jupiter itself and tapers into a tadpole-shaped tail extending more than million miles 1 billion kilometers behind Jupiter, as far as Saturn's orbit.

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