For The First Time Ever, We Finally Know What Jupiter Looks Like Below All Its Massive Clouds

One of NASA¡¯s Juno spacecraft¡¯s major goals, when it entered Jupiter¡¯s orbit in July 2016, was to study the gas giant and see what makes it tick.

This was always something we were curious about, given that the planet is blanketed in impenetrable cloud cover. Now, the $1 billion mission is finally paying off.

Four new research papers published talk about our first look at the surface of the planet and what it tells us about the internals. For one, we now know that Jupiter¡¯s atmosphere extends 3,000 kilometres down from the cloud tops towards the core of the planet. And once you reach that depth, things start to get funky.

At this depth, though Jupiter¡¯s interior behaves like a solid, it¡¯s actually a fluid mixture of hydrogen and helium, rotating in concert like a solid body.

NASA

This is huge, because we¡¯ve never really known what lay under Jupiter¡¯s clouds, or how far down they went, ever since they were spotted by Galileo 400 years ago.

When Galileo made his discovery centuries ago, he spotted the bands of Jupiter¡¯s clouds. Based on the new data, it¡¯s now clear these bands disappear 3,000 km deep in favour of a more uniform shape to the gases. At its core, the pressure is about 100,000 times the pressure we see on Earth. Another major finding is that Jupiter¡¯s gravitational field isn¡¯t symmetrical from North to South because of the varied wind and atmospheric flows on the planet.

In addition, the researchers also discovered that Jupiter¡¯s atmosphere contains about one percent of its mass. That¡¯s about weight of three Earths in just the gas giant¡¯s outer shell. Earth¡¯s atmosphere, for comparison, makes up just one-millionth of our planet¡¯s total mass.

Thanks to Juno, our knowledge of gas giants is about to vastly broaden in 2018. Things are about to get really exciting.

ALSO READ: NASA's Juno Spacecraft Swooped Over Jupiter To Snap Swirling Gas Clouds & It's Spectacular!