Jupiter
What kind of world is it?
Jupiter is so massive that the solar system is fairly described as “the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris”. It has no surface to stand on — just clouds all the way down into hydrogen crushed to a liquid metal. Its four largest moons, discovered by Galileo in 1610, are worlds in their own right; one of them, Europa, likely hides a saltwater ocean with more water than all Earth’s oceans combined.
Jupiter by the numbers
Notable moons
Jupiter has 101 known moons. The ones worth meeting:
Numbers only get you so far. The distances are the part nobody's brain handles — in the interactive view, switch to 1:1 scale and watch Jupiter shrink to an honest speck on an enormous empty orbit.
Keep going
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.