Jupiter facts - From the core to the cloud tops!

Hello there!

I thought I'd make this one a little fun and talk about some of the facts about Jupiter, some quick facts and a lot of information on the interior. Obviously this is something you can just Wiki, but to make it better I'll be using a rather amazing book, my own knowledge and some key sites. There is a lot here which is hard to find on the web, hopefully most of this is interesting, I'm only sorry I didn't include more...

First I think some quick facts are in order just to give you an overview!

Jupiter - quick facts

Jupiter
Credit: NASA

The main properties:

• Jupiter Mass - 1898,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kilograms                            Or... 317.83 Earth masses. Or... 1.8986 x10^27 Kg
  
• Jupiter Volume - 1431,280,000,000,000 cubic kilometres
    Or... 1321.3 Earth volumes. Or... 1.43128 x10^15 km^3
  
• Jupiter Density - 1326 Kilograms per metre cubed
    Or... 24% as dense as the Earth. Or...  1.326 x10^3 Kg/m^3
  
• Jupiter Radius (equatorial) - 71,492 Kilometres
    Or... 11.2 Earth Radii. Or... 7.149 x10^4 Km

Other important facts:

• A day on Jupiter is 9 Hours, 55minutes, 33seconds
• A year on Jupiter is 11 years, 317 days, 13 hours
• Jupiter's distance from the sun is 777,909,600 kilometres (5.2A.U.)
• Jupiter has 63 Moons: The largest 4 are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto 
• Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest in the solar system, it is approx 6.4million Km in radius (90 Jupiter radii). If it were visible, it would appear several times larger than our Moon does in the night sky.
• Jupiter's composition: 89.8% Hydrogen, 10% Helium approx.

OK so that was about as concise as I could make it. There were a lot of times when I wanted to explode with additional information; having not mentioned the history of observations and various probes that have been sent... I'll endeavour to make more posts regarding those in the future. Now for the science bit:

Jupiter's Interior

I'm going to go ahead and give a brief tour of Jupiter's guts, this shows everything:

• JUPITER'S CORE
  Going against the picture for one instance, Jupiter does in fact have a core; it isn't going to be empty space now is it? The core of Jupiter is approximately 20,000 degrees C and is cooling down at a rate of 1degrees C per 1 million years. It is also contracting under gravity at a rate of ~3cm per year. Due to the relatively warm conditions within, Jupiter's core is more likely to be liquid than solid. The pressure in this region is 40million Earth atmospheres (40million bar).
  The immense heat described above comes from the fact that Jupiter was formed from an enormous gas cloud, the gravitational energy that brought it together was and continues to be converted into heat energy. In other words, gravity gives particles kinetic energy (movement), and this is transformed into heat when particles collide - analogous to friction!
  
  
• Metallic Hydrogen Layer and magnetic field production
  Moving out to the 60,000-40,000km deep region shown on the above image the temperature reduces to 8,400 degrees C. The pressure (4million bar this time) is so enormous that the hydrogen atoms are split up into their constituent parts - Protons and Electrons.
  
  If you think back to your science classes in electricity, you will see that if you have charged particles (Electrons) moving, a current is produced. Now if you recall lessons in magnetism, you will remember that a moving current gives rise to a magnetic field. It is this vast amount of moving charge that gives rise to the largest magnetosphere (planetary magnetic field) in the solar system; Jupiter's. This layer is known as a Helium-Rich region, it contains more than the next layer...
  
  
• Molecular Region and Helium rain through the transition regionAn interesting phenomenon occurs in the transition region, recent studies show that Helium falls down into the lower Metallic region, this is known as Helium rain. It isn't exactly like normal rain, it is more like pouring a heavier liquid over a light one and seeing it seep through. 
  In the molecular region where molecules aren't destroyed by the pressure on them at this point - 20,000km ish, the pressure is 0.5 million bar and the temperature is a much cooler 5000degrees C. This region is known as a Helium-Poor region for it is losing it to lower layers by 'rain' described above.
  
  
• Jupiter's surface and atmosphere???
  I think this is a question that baffles a lot of people, I will settle this once and for all... I hope. Firstly it is best to picture Jupiter as a giant ball of liquid (because that's what it is), so in that respect it must eventually have a kind of surface, just not the type you'd want to land on! Secondly, the question is where do you draw a line, the answer is simple...instead of using Jupiter's surface, we just use our own - Jupiter's surface is defined as 'the 1 bar level' or '1 Earth atmosphere'.
  
  So the atmosphere is then everything above 1 bar just like it is for the Earth! I will briefly summarise the atmosphere because we know an awful lot more about it than anything else - it deserves several blog posts of it's own. Jupiter's atmosphere extends from the 1 bar level to about 1000km, it has a temperature ranging from approximately -200 up to 800 deg C. The interesting thing to note at this point is, this is the part we observe from the Earth, and it is found that Jupiter is giving off twice as much heat as it is receiving, nobody knows how this is happening; although it must obviously be emanating from the hot core.
  
  
  Well thank you for your interest in Jupiter to those that have read this, I partially posted this so I could reinforce my own perspective of the planet - it is important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
  
  See you soon!
  
  
  
  
  - Further reading if you want it:
  For general reading: this book is handy for gas giant related things.
  I used this book to check some nice facts, I recommend it for researchers, it is pretty much the only comprehensive book on the subject, and they do a grand job!