Jump to: Intro, Discovering Jupiter, Significant Dates, Page 2: Atmosphere, Clouds, Interior, Page 3: Energy, The Magnetic Field.

Energy:
      There are many theories for the energy source of Jupiter. It loses a large amount of heat in relation to its supply, which means that the planet must have some source that compensates for its loss. Jupiter radiates 1.6 times as much energy as falls on it from the Sun. This means that Jupiter has an internal heat source. It is believed that this heat is residual and left over from the original collapse of the primordial nebula to form the Solar System, but some may come from slow contractions (liquids are highly incompressible, so Jupiter cannot be contracting very much.) This internal heat source is presumably responsible for driving the complex weather pattern in its atmosphere, unlike the Earth where the primary heat source driving the weather is the Sun. Another possible source could be the conversion of gravitational potential energy to heat. 

       Jupiter has a large, complex, and intense magnetic field that is thought to arise from electrical currents in the interior. The Earth has a strong magnetic field, but Jupiter's magnetic field ten times stronger than that of the Earth.

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The Magnetic Field:
      The magnetic field is doughnut shaped (or toroidal). It contains larger versions of the Earth's Van Allen Belts that trap high-energy charged particles. These belts are flattened into plasma sheets in the case of Jupiter. The field rotates approximately every 9 hours. The satellites Amalthea, Io, Europa, and Ganymede all orbit through this region. 

       The magnetosphere of Jupiter is enormous. Interacting with solar winds of charged particles from the sun, it forms a bow shock, like that produced by the bow of a ship in water that deflects the charged particles of the solar wind. The magnetosphere is strongly affected by the solar wind, pulsing in shape and size. It can shrink to about a third of its maximum size when the solar wind is strong. 

       Intense auroras have been observed on Jupiter. Since the bow shock of Jupiter's magnetosphere deflects solar wind away from Jupiter's atmosphere, the charged particles responsible for the auroras must come from another source. They are thought to originate from the innermost satellites that orbit the region with a strong magnetic field and trapped charged particles. In fact, they have found that the auroras are caused by Io. Io is linked by an electrical current of charged particles called an "flux tube" to Jupiter. The charged particles that are ejected from Io by volcanic eruptions, flow along Jupiter's magnetic field lines, which thread through Io, to the planet's north and south magnetic poles. These charged particles hit the atmosphere of Jupiter and interact with the hydrogen gas, it glows, or makes auroral emissions. Those bright spots are called footprints. They change in brightness and structure as Jupiter rotates. 

Ultraviolet pictures of Jupiter's Aurora taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2. The top left picture (in the image below) taken in visible light of Jupiter and Io. The top right is an ultraviolet picture of Jupiter and Io can't be seen because it's too faint. The two bottom pictures are ultraviolet false-color images of Jupiter and show how the auroras move around as the planet rotates and how the magnetic poles are offset on Jupiter by 10 to 15 degrees.

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Features of Jupiter

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