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Like a bad Tinder date, Jupiter is not as big as billed.
Scholastic materials across academia will need an overhaul after scientists made the startling discovery that our solar system’s largest planet is smaller and flatter than previously thought.
“Textbooks will need to be updated,” study co-author Yohai Kaspi, a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a statement. “The size of Jupiter hasn’t changed, of course, but the way we measure it has.”
In the study published in Nature Astronomy, the international team of scientists provided the most precise measurements yet of the gas giant. They found that the planet is 88,841 miles wide at the equator — around 5 miles slimmer than previously thought, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, Jupiter’s diameter from pole to pole clocks in at around 83,067 miles, approximately 15 miles smaller than previously estimated, making it also much flatter than we thought.
While these differences might seem negligible given the gas planet’s gargantuan proportions, this marks a major shift from the prior measurements, which were based on data amassed by NASA’s Voyager and Pioneer robotic spacecraft in the late 1970s.
What prompted this case of Jupiter descending in weight? Dr. Eli Galanti, a scientist who spearheaded the research in Kaspi’s team said they gleaned the new intel after being granted a “rare opportunity” to lead the analysis of as many as 26 new measurements made by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
This probe has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, but NASA extended its mission in 2021 so they could keep doing recon on the gas ball and its moons.
Contrary to its prior orbit, Juno’s augmented trajectory allowed the spacecraft to fly behind Jupiter from Earth’s vantage point, thereby offering scientists a whole new view of the gaseous mass.
“When the spacecraft passes behind the planet, its radio communication signal is blocked and bent by Jupiter’s atmosphere,” said Juno’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Scott J. Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This enables an accurate measurement of Jupiter’s size.”
By tracking the radio signals’ curvature as they pass through Jupiter’s atmosphere, the team was able to create detailed maps of Jupiter’s temperature and density, in turn painting a more precise profile of the slimmed-down planet.
Unlike the prior research, they also factored in the gas planet’s winds, which slightly affect its shape.
“It’s difficult to see what’s happening beneath the clouds of Jupiter, but the radio data give us a window into the depth of Jupiter’s zonal winds and powerful hurricanes,” Kaspi explained.
The study marked one small shift for Jupiter and one major step for the field of astronomy.
“Shifting the radius by just a little lets our models of Jupiter’s interior fit both the gravity data and atmospheric measurements much better,” said Galanti.
On a large scale, the study sheds more light on how “planets form and evolve,” according to Kaspi.
“Jupiter was likely the first planet to form in the solar system, and by studying what’s happening inside it, we get closer to understanding how the solar system, and planets like ours, came to be,” he declared.
English (US)