Pluto (Giants of The Solar System)

Pluto has the largest, most eccentric and most highly-inclined orbit of any of the known planets. Because of this large eccentricity, Pluto, when near perihelion, is actually closer to the Sun than Neptune can ever be; this will next occur in 1989. The highly-inclined orbit takes Pluto as much as a billion and a quarter […]

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Uranus And Neptune (Giants of The Solar System)

Uranus and Neptune are difficult bodies to study. The radiation received at the Earth from Uranus is less than one-thousandth of that received from Jupiter and from Neptune it is even less. The greater distances of the two planets make surface details more difficult to detect than on either Jupiter or Saturn. No planets are […]

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Saturn (Giants of The Solar System)

Beyond Jupiter is Saturn, the most distant planet that was known to the ancients. With the obvious exception of the rings, it appears to be similar to Jupiter in many ways. Saturn’s rings effectively consist of an enormous number of minute satellites and are considered, together with the ten known satellites Saturn is the least […]

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Jupiter’s magnetic field (Giants of The Solar System)

In 1955, when radio astronomy was still a comparatively new science, astronomers near Washington DC were looking for previously undiscovered radio sources of small apparent size. Their telescope picked up strong waves at a frequency of 22.2MHz, corresponding to a wavelength of 13.5metres. At first they attributed these radio waves to terrestrial sources such as […]

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Inside Jupiter (Giants of The Solar System)

Direct measurements of the conditions deep inside Jupiter are of course impossible. Calculations of these conditions are, however, constrained in a number of ways. The low mean density, only 1.3 times that of water, implies that the composition must be very different from the terrestrial planets with their typical mean density of live times that, […]

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Energy Balance of Jupiter (Giants of The Solar System)

The apparent magnitude of Jupiter varies to some extent because of its varying distance from the Earth, but this is not sufficient to explain all the observed changes. Since 1862, the mean opposition magnitude has ranged over 0.45 magnitudes so that, at the bright­est opposition, Jupiter was reflecting 50 per cent more light than at […]

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Great Red Spot (Giants of The Solar System)

The most prominent and permanent feature of the visible surface of Jupiter is the GREAT BED SPOT . It is an elongated area of variable size; at its largest,-in the 1880s, it was about 38500km long by 13800km wide and had a surface area about equal to that of the Earth. The spot lies in […]

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Jupiter Observed (Giants of The Solar System)

When we look at Jupiter we see only the uppermost cloud layers in its atmosphere. The composition of the atmosphere at this level can be determined spectroscopically . The first re¬ported observations of dark absorption bands in Jupiter’s spectrum were made by Angelo Secchi in 1863. It was not until the early 1930s that the […]

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Jupiter (Giants of The Solar System)

Jupiter, the nearest, of the giant, planets, in also the largest and most massive. It appears brighter than any other planet apart from Venus; at times it may even cast, a shadow. Some of its surface features, and the four brightest satellites, can easily be seen in a small telescope, or even in binoculars. .Jupiter’s […]

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The outer Solar System ( Giants of The Solar System)

The inner planets and their satellites, described in the previous chapter, comprise less than half of one per cent of the planetary mass in the Solar System: more than 99.5 per cent of the planetary matter is found beyond the orbit of Mars. This region includes most of the asteroids and comets, the giant planets […]

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