Júpiter station

Neighbouring stations

• 3Line 3Tres Anegas ← Júpiter → La Patera

The story behind the icon

The station icon represents the planet Jupiter. The station takes its name from a nearby street of the same name, part of the Nueva Industrial Vallejo neighbourhood. Jupiter is the fifth planet of the Solar System and one of the so-called outer or gas planets. It is named after the Roman god Jupiter, Zeus in Greek mythology. It is the planet that shines most brightly through the year, depending on its phase. After the Sun it is the largest body in the Solar System, with a mass almost two and a half times that of all the other planets combined and 318 times that of the Earth. Jupiter is a massive gaseous body made up mainly of hydrogen and helium, with no defined inner surface; its atmosphere is permanently covered in clouds that make it possible to trace atmospheric dynamics and that show a high degree of turbulence. The planet is known for its atmospheric features: the Great Red Spot, an enormous anticyclone whose winds at the edge of the vortex reach close to 400 km/h, sits in the tropical latitudes of the southern hemisphere and is easily made out given its great size, roughly two and a half times that of the Earth; the atmosphere is divided into dark belts called Bands and light regions called Zones, all of them running along the parallels.

The bands and zones mark out a system of wind currents that alternate in direction with latitude and are generally very strong, with zonal winds reaching speeds of up to 140 m/s (504 km/h). It is thought that it may be a "failed star" because of its large amounts of hydrogen and helium.

Jupiter's main satellites were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610; there are four of them and they are very different from one another: Io, the innermost, is a volcanic world with a constantly renewed surface; Europa is an icy world beneath which liquid water oceans are thought to lie; Ganymede, 5,268 km across, is the largest satellite in the whole Solar System and is made up of an iron core covered by a mantle of rock and ice; Callisto is notable for being the body with the greatest number of impact craters in the entire Solar System. Besides the Galilean satellites, the various space probes sent to Jupiter and observations from Earth have raised the total number of minor satellites to 63. Jupiter also has a faint ring system; the main ring is about 6,500 km wide, orbits the planet at some 1,000,000 km and is less than ten kilometres thick vertically. Its optical thickness is so slight that it has only been observed by the Voyager 1 and 2 and Galileo space probes