How Long Is A Day On Jupiter? You Wouldn’t Get Much Work Done

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, and it is the fastest rotating planet despite its size. The speed of rotation of a world determines the duration of the day. A solar day refers to how long a planet takes to do a full rotation, including daytime and nighttime hours.

Fith in line from the Earth’s sun, Jupiter is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium gases. NASA says that if Jupiter has a central solid core, it should be about the size of Earth. Eleven Earths could fit across Jupiter’s equator. Jupiter is believed to keep Earth safe. Its massive size and gravitation pull attract rogue asteroids and meteorites, blocking many on possible collision routes to Earth since the beginning of the formation of the solar system.

A day in Jupiter takes about 10 hours. If someone could sit on Jupiter (which they can’t because it has no solid surface), they would see the sunrise every five hours. And during the five-hour nights, they would surely spot one, or several, of its 75 moons. Jupiter days are short because it is mainly made of gas. This allows it to rotate fast. A day in Jupiter is called a Jovian day. Jupiter days may be short, but a year in Jupiter is very long. Known as a Jovian Year, it takes up to 12 Earth years.

Why All The Spinning?

The duration of days on planets are all very different. A day in Mercury can feel like a busy Monday here on Earth, with more than 1,400 hours in it. In distant dwarf planet Pluto, a day takes about 153.3 hours. Even on The Earth’s moon, things are different. It takes two weeks before the sun rises again when night arrives there. But this is because days and nights on the moon are created by the time it takes to rotate around Earth and not on its axis. So why all the spinning?

Planets rotate because the matter from which they were created was in motion. When cosmic dust and gases came together to form planets, they conserved their movement. This is known as “conservation of angular momentum.” As crazy as it may sound, planets rotate today because they still conserve a force that has been moving for more than 4.6 billion years. The energy is conserved because all matter has fallen into an asteroid, planet, or moon due to gravity in space. Because there is no matter, there is a vacuum. The Laws of inertia of physics say that an object will maintain its speed as long as nothing stops it (resistance).

It took astronomers a long time to determine the speed at which Jupiter rotates. This was because a gas planet like Jupiter has no solid surface and appears as clouds, storms, and gases on a telescope. Without any identifiable landmark, astronomers could not measure the speed of rotation. Finally, using more advanced measurements like magnetism and even advanced storm tracing, they determined that a day in Jupiter lasts exactly 9.92496 hours. But this is, give or take. Scientists are constantly updating their findings.

Source: NASA, Scientific America