Stargazing
Jupiter, the return of the King By Ken Cambell
Have you noticed the very bright ‘Star’ rising in the East at around 10.00pm? It is not a star but is the planet Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. And this month Jupiter comes its closest to the Earth and even through binoculars or a small telescope Jupiter is a marvellous sight.
But unlike the Earth, Jupiter is not made from solid rock but instead is nothing more than a giant ball of mostly hydrogen gas. There is no solid core in Jupiter; it is just a massive amount of hydrogen that has formed itself into this giant ball.
Jupiter is the 5th planet from the Sun; it takes nearly 12 years to orbit the Sun once but it rotates very quickly about its axis, a day on Jupiter is only 10 hours long and because it rotates so quickly it is bulging at the equator and is flattened at the poles. This distortion can easily be seen in binoculars or a telescope.
Jupiter has over 63 natural moons orbiting around it but four of them, Callisto, Ganymede, Io and Europa can easily be seen from Earth. Ganymede is the biggest moon in the solar system it is almost as big as Mars. It was the Italian astronomer Galileo who first spotted these moons circling around Jupiter in 1609 and because of this he proposed the idea that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe but instead was just another planet orbiting the Sun. He was arrested and tried by the Catholic Church for heresy for suggesting such a thing; he was found guilty and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was only in 1992 that the Pope issued a public apology to Galileo announcing that he was right after all.
In 1995 NASA sent a space probe to Jupiter to take very high resolution photographs of it and its Moons and it was Europa that became the most interesting. Europa is completely covered with ice almost like an egg shell, but the ice contains cracks on its surface. These cracks are most likely caused by a liquid ocean beneath the ice that is breaking its way through to the surface. NASA pondered on what could be keeping the ocean from freezing up and they believe that it must be coming from thermal vents deep below the oceans.
We have exactly the same thermal vents below our oceans and living around them is a whole eco system of crabs, shrimps and other strange life forms. Scientists believe that the same conditions probably exist on Europa so in 2020 NASA intend to land a probe onto the ice. This probe, which is already under construction, will then heat up and melt its way through the ice, eventually it will drop into the ocean beneath where it will convert into a submarine and will swim around under the ice sending live TV pictures back to Earth. I have got €50 here and now that says that here they will find extra terrestrial life, under the ice on Europa!
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