The Seven Most Amazing Discoveries We've Made By Exploring Jupiter

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Jupiter's extreme heft is its most characteristic feature. Owing to its gravitational prowess, Jupiter plays a "big brother" role in the solar system—it has had a hand in many historical events. Four billion years ago, the behemoth conspired with Saturn to combine their gravitational might to hurl comets and asteroids across the solar system. Such an event may have even brought about a cataclysmic period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment—when planetesimals peppered the inner solar system and potentially forged many of the craters that pockmark the surface of the moon today.

In the last 50 years, spacefaring missions and the development of more powerful telescopes have allowed scientists to peer past Jupiter's clouds and dissect the planet with unprecedented clarity. Scientists have found that Jupiter's environment is extremely hostile. Long-lasting storms jet around the planet and paint the surface in multicolor bands. Lethal levels of radiation threaten to fry any interloper. Like their mother planet, the Galilean moons are also far from being placid worlds.

With its gorgeous swirling overcoat and nature of extremes, Jupiter has long captured the public imagination and continues to inspire scientific study. Recent discoveries have only heightened Jupiter's mystique, enticing researchers to probe this far-flung realm. Here are some of the most enthralling findings scientists have made about Jupiter and its moons in the last five decades.

As a gas giant, Jupiter isn't terra firma—all the way down to its fuzzy core. At its center is a diluted mixture of heavy-element solids and gases squeezed beyond recognition by gravity. Imagine biting into day-old boba that's still soft on the outside but has hardened somewhat in the middle—Jupiter has a similar consistency, one of a fluffy outer layer that transitions into a dense core in one continuum.

Jupiter's strange interior was discovered by the Juno mission in 2017 through gravity field measurements , a technique that maps the subtle variations in the gravitational tug on a spacecraft as it skims all across the planet. The gravity data looked nothing like that for planets with a sharp solid-fluid boundary, prompting scientists to propose that Jupiter has a fuzzy core. "We still don't fully understand exactly what is going on," says Heidi Becker, a NASA planetary scientist and one of Juno's co-investigative leads.

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