For centuries, Jupiter has looked like a planet of surfaces: swirling bands, violent storms and the famous red oval that dominates its face. Only in the last few years have scientists begun to see that the real story is buried far below those clouds, where something vast, heavy and deeply alien is reshaping ideas about how giant planets form. I see a picture emerging of a world whose hidden interior is as dramatic as the storms that rage above it, and whose secrets are starting to matter for how we understand planets across the galaxy.
New probes, computer models and gravity measurements now point to a massive, diffuse core and deep, buried flows of material that extend far beneath the visible atmosphere. Together they suggest that Jupiter is not a simple ball of gas wrapped around a neat rock, but a layered, evolving system whose interior is still mixing and changing.
Storms that plunge hundreds of kilometers down
The first hints that Jupiter’s atmosphere hides something enormous below came from its storms. The planet’s most recognizable feature, the Great Red Spot, has been raging for centuries, but only recently have measurements shown that this storm is not just a surface swirl. Researchers now find that Jupiter’s massive storm extends 500 kilometers below the atmosphere and even deeper into regions where pressures are high enough to crush most spacecraft long before they could send back data.
That depth matters because it means the planet’s weather is tied to its interior structure, not just a thin outer shell. A follow up analysis of Jupiter’s dense clouds shows that these storms tap into layers where temperatures and pressures drive complex chemistry, hinting that the visible bands are only the top of a much thicker, more energetic system. When I look at those results, I see storms acting like drill bits, punching into the planet and giving us indirect access to the depths below.
Buried jets and deep atmospheric engines
Beyond individual storms, the entire planet is threaded with powerful jet streams that do not stop at the cloud tops. Observations from NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveal a mysterious buried jet that runs beneath the visible atmosphere, a kind of hidden conveyor belt of gas that carries energy and momentum through the planet’s interior. These deep flows help explain why Jupiter’s bands are so stable and long lived, and they suggest that the atmosphere and interior are tightly coupled.
Other measurements show that what goes on below Jupiter’s atmosphere is a bit of a mystery, but researchers are closer to understanding how it works with observations from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Those data show that the jets extend thousands of kilometers down, blurring the line between atmosphere and interior. When I put these pieces together, I see Jupiter less as a planet with weather on top and more as a single, global engine, with buried jets acting as the transmission that links surface storms to the deep core.
A core that is neither solid, liquid, nor gas
The most dramatic shift in our understanding comes from the heart of the planet itself. For decades, textbooks depicted Jupiter as a gas envelope wrapped around a compact rocky center, but new gravity and modeling work indicate that Jupiter’s core is neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous, but something much stranger. One analysis describes a diffuse, extended region of heavy elements that behaves more like a planetary slush than a neat ball, a picture captured in recent explanations of what lies inside the giant planet.
At the center lies a mysterious core, possibly a molten slushy mass or a rock 14 to 18 times Earth‘s mass, which would make it one of the most massive planetary cores known in the Solar System. A complementary breakdown of the latest evidence emphasizes that Jupiter’s core is extended and partially mixed into the surrounding layers, rather than sharply separated. To me, that suggests a planet still bearing the scars of its violent birth, with heavy elements stirred and stretched by early collisions and long term convection.
Metallic hydrogen and a planet rich in oxygen
Surrounding that strange core is a region where hydrogen, normally the lightest and simplest of gases, transforms under crushing pressure into something exotic. New models show that deeper inside the planet, hydrogen transforms again into a strange state called metallic hydrogen, a fluid that can conduct electricity like metal and is thought to power Jupiter’s intense magnetic field. This metallic layer is not a thin shell, it occupies a huge fraction of the planet’s volume, another sign that something massive and invisible is shaping what we see from afar.
At the same time, computer models let scientists peer into the mystery beneath Jupiter‘s clouds and estimate that the planet has about one and a half times more oxygen than the Sun. A separate analysis of Jupiter’s clouds hides a secret and finds that the planet contains about one and a half times more oxygen than the Sun, a result that provides an important clue to how much water and heavy material the planet swallowed as it formed. When I consider those numbers, I see a world that is not just a hydrogen balloon, but a reservoir of oxygen and other elements that rival or exceed the composition of its parent star.
Storms, clues and what Jupiter means for Earth
To understand how all these pieces fit together, I keep coming back to the way scientists have used storms as probes. Storms, Clouds, and Chemical Clues in the atmosphere have been watched by Astronomers for More than 360 years, and now those observations are being combined with gravity data and interior models to infer how much water and oxygen Jupiter contains. The result is a coherent picture in which the visible atmosphere, the metallic hydrogen layer and the diffuse core are all part of a single, chemically rich system.
However, NASA‘s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter‘s atmospheric features, having revealed intricate clouds, polar vortices and powerful jet streams that tie directly into the interior. By studying other planets, we hope to inform our understanding not just of those other planets, but of the Earth, too, as geophysics professor Jeremy Bl has argued. When I look at Jupiter’s massive hidden core, its metallic hydrogen ocean and its deep buried jets, I see a natural laboratory for understanding how planets move heat, generate magnetic fields and mix their interiors, including our own world beneath its comparatively thin crust.
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