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3-hour timelapse showing rotation of Jupiter and orbital motion of the moons. Jupiter is the only planet whose barycentre with the Sun lies outside the volume of the Sun, though by 7% of the Sun's radius. [130] [131] The average distance between Jupiter and the Sun is 778 million km (5.20 AU) and it completes an orbit every 11.86 years.
Typically, the stated rotation period for a giant planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) is its internal rotation period, as determined from the rotation of the planet's magnetic field. For objects that are not spherically symmetrical, the rotation period is, in general, not fixed, even in the absence of gravitational or tidal forces
For example, Jupiter has a synodic period of 398.8 days from Earth; thus, Jupiter's opposition occurs once roughly every 13 months. If the orbital periods of the two bodies around the third are called T 1 and T 2 , so that T 1 < T 2 , their synodic period is given by: [ 7 ]
[19] [42] The ultimate source of this energy is Jupiter's rotation, which is tapped by Io through the tides it raises on Jupiter and is transferred to Europa and Ganymede by the orbital resonance. [42] [43] Analysis of the unique cracks lining Europa yielded evidence that it likely spun around a tilted axis at some point in time.
Europa (Jupiter II), the second of the four Galilean moons, is the second closest to Jupiter and the smallest at 3121.6 kilometers in diameter, which is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon. The name comes from a mythical Phoenician noblewoman, Europa , who was courted by Zeus and became the queen of Crete , though the name did not become widely ...
The plasma in the torus is forced into co-rotation with Jupiter, meaning both share the same period of rotation. [24] The Io torus fundamentally alters the dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere. [25] As a result of several processes—diffusion and interchange instability being the main escape mechanisms—the plasma slowly leaks away from ...
A celestial object's axial tilt indicates whether the object's rotation is prograde or retrograde. Axial tilt is the angle between an object's rotation axis and a line perpendicular to its orbital plane passing through the object's centre. An object with an axial tilt up to 90 degrees is rotating in the same direction as its primary.
Observations of variations in the brightness of Io as it rotated, made by Joel Stebbins in the 1920s, showed that Io's day was the same length as its orbital period around Jupiter, thus proving that one side always faced Jupiter just as the Moon's near-side always faces the Earth. [27]