Jupiter is so freaking massive, it doesn't actually orbit the Sun

Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, gas giant, and subject of the Juno mission, is huge. Huge.

It's so huge, in fact, that it doesn't actually orbit the Sun. Not exactly. With 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, it's big enough that the centre of gravity between Jupiter and the Sun doesn't actually reside inside the Sun – rather, at a point in space just above the Sun's surface.

Here's how that works.

When a small object orbits a big object in space, the less massive one doesn't really travel in a perfect circle around the larger one. Rather, both objects orbit a combined centre of gravity.

In situations we're familiar with – like Earth orbiting the much-larger Sun – the centre of gravity resides so close to the centre of the larger object that the impact of this phenomenon is negligible. The bigger object doesn't seem to move, and the smaller one draws a circle around it.

But reality is always more complicated.

For example: when the International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth, both Earth and the space station orbit their combined centre of gravity. But that centre of gravity is so absurdly close to the centre of Earth that the planet's motion around the point is impossible to spot – and the ISS follows a near-perfect circle around the whole planet.

The same truth holds when most planets orbit the Sun. The Sun is just so much larger than Earth, Venus, Mercury, or even Saturn that their centres of mass with the Sun all lie deep within the star itself.

Not so with Jupiter.

The gas giant is so big that its centre of mass with the Sun, or barycenter, actually lies 1.07 solar radii from the middle of the Sun — or 7 percent of a Sun-radius above the Sun's surface. Both the Sun and Jupiter orbit around that point in space.

This not-to-scale gif from NASA illustrates the effect:

That is, in essence, how Jupiter and the Sun move through space together – though the distances and sizes are far different. Jupiter is still only a fraction of the Sun's size.

So next time someone asks you for a crazy space fact, you'll know: Jupiter is so massive, it doesn't orbit the Sun.

Comments

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone — scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what — you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise told Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...

Where the Swastika Was Found 12,000 Years Before Hitler Made Us Uncomfortable About I

Minoan pottery from Crete. The Minoan civilization flourished from 3,000 to 1,100 B.C. (Agon S. Buchholz/Wikimedia Commons) ) Swastika from a 2nd century A.D. Roman mosaic. (Maciej Szczepańczyk/Wikimedia Commons A srivatsa (swastika) sign at Nata-dera Temple, Japan. (Cindy Drukier/Epoch Times) From the Sican/Lambayeque civilization in Peru, which flourished 750 to 1375 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons) Ancient Macedonian helmet with swastika marks, 350-325 B.C., found at Herculanum. (Cabinet des Medailles, Paris/Wikimedia Commons) A Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Hong Kong with a swastika symbol on the chest. (Shutterstock*) A 3,000-year-old necklace found in the Rasht Province of Iran. (Wikimedia Commons) The aviator Matilde Moisant(1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators. (Wikimedia Commons) A mandala-like swastika, composed of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a circle and a mystica...

Einstein’s Lost Theory Describes a Universe Without a Big Bang

Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929. Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology. In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the entire universe . For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein. Einstein began by applying his field equations of gravitation to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog