How fast does jupiter rotate

Earth and Sun from the Moon's South Pole. Moon Phase and Libration, Moon Phase and Libration, South Up. CGI Moon Kit. Figure 1: An illustrative view of planet formation and the effect of magnetic fields red lines. We are taking a look inside a protoplanetary disk, with the host star to the left, zooming in on a Jupiter-like planet being formed. The planet has its own circle of influence, the edges of which correspond to the purple regions. We can see that material flows onto the planet from above, and that material can only fall onto the planet if it is very nearly falling directly down.

Material that falls just off to the side gets added to the de-cretion disk and thus shucked off into the gaseous nebula. The planet slows down via magnetic-field induction that invokes a force in the opposite direction of the original Keplerian rotation, which is the same direction as the planet is rotating.

I am a second-year graduate student at the University of Michigan. I study protoplanetary disk environments and astrochemistry, which set the stage for planet formation.

Jupiter has the fastest rotation of all the planets in the Solar System. Instead of being a perfect sphere, Jupiter looks more like a squashed ball. The bulge at the equator is even visible in small, backyard telescopes. This bulge dramatically effects the diameter of Jupiter, depending on whether you measure it from the center of Jupiter to the equator or to the poles.

The polar radius of Jupiter is 66, km, while the equatorial radius is 71, km. With magnetic breaking blue , Jupiter spins down first, leaving it with about the right rotation period by the time it contracts to its current size. Now that the model in this paper has demonstrated magnetic braking can lead to about the right spin rate for Jupiter and Saturn too , Batygin hopes future work will explore more meticulous aspects of the problem related to magnetohydrodynamics MHD , both with an analytic approach like with the equations in this paper and also simulations which were not used directly in this model.

The astrophysicists living on Jupiter or gas giant exoplanets in other star systems will have plenty more time per day to investigate this problem. And they may have both magnetic fields and how these planets accreted their atmospheres to thank.

Email Address. Suggest a Paper Topic! About the Author. About Michael Hammer I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona, where I am working with Kaitlin Kratter on simulating planets, vortices, and other phenomena in protoplanetary disks. Jim Jeson on April 14, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Subscribe Enter your email to receive notifications of new posts. Follow us on Twitter Follow astrobites.