Solar System's Most Massive Mysterious Sphere
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest, is more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined (the mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth).
The giant gas planet's enormous magnetosphere is the biggest thing in our entire solar system. Not only is it big enough to hold all of Jupiter's moons, it is ten times the diameter of the Sun. Even though it is, on average, five times farther away than the Sun, Jupiter's magnetic field reaches all the way to Saturn and would appear roughly twice the apparent size of the sun. If it could be seen at night, it would be as big in the sky as the full moon. Far from spherical, the magnetosphere extends a few million kilometers in the direction toward the Sun.
The Pioneer probes confirmed that Jupiter's enormous magnetic field is 10 times stronger than Earth's and contains 20,000 times as much energy.
Launched on 2 March 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel through the Asteroid belt, and the first spacecraft to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. Famed as the most remote object ever made by man through most of its mission, Pioneer 10 is now over 8 billion miles away, it's last, fading signals heard in March 2003.
The sensitive instruments aboard Pioneer 10 found that the Jovian magnetic field's "north" magnetic pole is at the planet’s geographic south pole, with the axis of the magnetic field tilted 11 degrees from the Jovian rotation axis and offset from the center of Jupiter in a manner similar to the axis of the Earth's field. The Pioneers measured the bow shock of the Jovian magnetosphere to the width of 26 million kilometers (16 million miles), with the magnetic tail extending beyond Saturn’s orbit.
The unusual way that Jupiter's magnetic field is made affects the shape of different parts of Jupiter's magnetosphere.
Jupiter has a donut-shaped cloud which goes around inside the magnetosphere, which lights up with a beautiful aurora. Jupiter also makes radio signals, called whistler waves, chorus and hiss.
Jupiter's magnetic field is oddly shaped. The Pioneer data showed that streams of high-energy atomic particles are ejected from the Jovian magnetosphere and travel as far as the orbit of the Earth.
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