Unfolding the mysteries of Jupiter’s moon

Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is an ice shell with an underground sea. The new movie “Europa Report” is based on NASA’s idea of how to explore the fourth-largest moon on Jupiter, based on real science. This summer, Live Science’s sister site, Life’s Little Mysteries, introduces you to The Greatest Mysteries of the Cosmos every week, starting with the coolest in the solar system. However, this tidal force may not explain such a large force. The history of how Io’s gravitational bending changed remains unclear.

Scott Bolton, a Chief Scientist at NASA’s Jupiter probe Juno, said, “I don’t think we know enough about the exact frequency of these things to evaluate the entire mechanism adequately.”

Jupiter, the largest planet

Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, has the largest number of satellites and currently has 64 registered satellites. Most of these moons are small massive rocks that appear to be asteroids captured by Jupiter’s gravity, clustered on giant planets as if there were many bees around the hive.

But four of Jupiter’s moons are so large that they can be seen with primitive telescopes. In 1610, Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer who invented this telescope, first saw a satellite named “Galileo’s Satellite”: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Jupiter’s atmosphere 

 Jupiter’s clouds cover a very rough place. Jupiter’s huge pressure has crushed the planet’s interior as it is formed (perhaps even now, when Jupiter is shrinking), and its heat is still leaking from the planet. Jupiter is far from the sun, but this internal heat warms the planet and plays a major role in its weather.

Jupiter emits twice as much infrared energy as it receives from the sun. The temperature at the center of Jupiter is thought to be about 24,000°C higher than the sun’s surface. This heat leaks out through the liquid metal or liquid hydrogen layer and supplies energy to the atmosphere.  As a soup is placed on a heated stove, the air in the atmosphere boils from the warm bottom to the cold top, and the temperature above the atmosphere is 261°F (-163°C). Juno maps the temperature of the atmosphere at different depths.