Scientists have recently made an exciting disovery about Jupiter, the largest and oldest planet in our Solar System.
According to the new findings published in Nature Astronomy, Jupiter was once so massive that it could have contained 2,000 Earths within it.
Jupiter is currently about 11 times wider than Earth. To help you imagine this, NASA explains that if Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be like a basketball.
Not only it is huge, but it also has extremely powerful presence, its mass is 2.5 times greater than the combined mass of all the other planets in the Solar System.
Study:
Konstantin Batygin, professor of planetary science at Caltech, explained, "Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle. This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire Solar System took shape."
Amalthea and Thebe, the two tiny moons, are the smallest and closest to Jupiter among its major moons.
Scientists studied how these moons move in orbit and made a surprising discovery about Jupiter's past.
Result:
They found that just 3.8 million years after the first solid materials formed in our Solar System, Jupiter was 2 to 2.5 times bigger than it is today.
Not only this, the researchers also found that Jupiter was not only much larger in the past but also had a magnetic field about 50 times stronger than it is now.
Scientists believe that Jupiter once had a much stronger magnetic field, which helped it attract and gather huge amounts of material from space, making it grow very large.
But as the nearby gas and dust were used up, Jupiter stopped growing and began to shrink and even now, Jupiter continues to slowly shrink.
