Jupiter

Here’s a treat for Saipan’s early birds: Saipan’s pre-dawn sky should have Jupiter hanging overhead. I’m a bungling amateur in the planetary realm, and I’m having time zone issues today so I offer no warrantees, express or implied, but I think that Jupiter should be smack dab overhead at around 4am. That’s the clock’s most notoriously depressing time, but Jupiter is too juicy to resist right now, very big, very bright.

And being directly overhead gives earthlings the best chance of getting a good view. All astronomical bodies are like that. The higher in the sky, the better the mileage. After all, everything likes to roll down hill, right? Makes sense to me. Well, actually, the geometry of the gig means that the higher an astronomical body is over the Earth’s horizon, the less atmosphere the light has to cut through to reach us.

Not even the mighty sun can override this fact. That’s why tourists get broiled to a ripe tomato-red at high noon, but they barely rate a bubble-gum pink during their morning mimosa.

Even a small telescope can spy four of Jupiter’s moons and some of its trademark gaseous bands if the skies are clear. Over the years I’ve taken occasional glimpses of this, and I bought a nice telescope this year that has fueled my appetite for, what else, a bigger telescope. I’m told that even binoculars can spot some of Jupiter’s moons, but I can’t try that because I always lose my binocs.

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. If it was hollow all the other planets in the solar system could fit inside of it. But it’s not hollow, according to the books I’ve seen, which say there’s a solid core there. Outside of that core the planet is largely a big blob of swirling gasses, most of which are hydrogen.

Jupiter is so big, in fact, that it almost made it to “star” instead of mere “planet.” Had it been born with some more brawn, the extra mass would have generated more gravity, which would have pulled Jupiter in tighter around its own center, and which would have triggered the nuclear fusion machine.

Had that happened, our solar system would have been a “binary” system of two stars orbiting each other.

That’s not a rare thing. Lots of stars are binary systems. In the ’70s they told us that about half the stars out there were binary systems. Surely the modern age has refined that theory one way or the other, but I never got the memo.

So I’m still confronting the wonders of the universe armed with knowledge from the disco era, back when “Nova” had “Chevy” before it, a “Satellite” was a Plymouth, and “Galaxy” meant Ford.

Anyway, if Jupiter had the horsepower to become a star, just imagine the weather reports here:

“Hafa Adai, Commonwealth, tomorrow’s temperature will be 79 degrees in the morning, rising to 451 degrees by first noon, then falling to 285 degrees at second noon. Winds will be out of the southeast at 700 miles per hour, great news for you sail boaters, but keep an eye out for occasional storms of boiling methane in the late afternoon.”

As I scratch this out on the back of an envelope from a lawn chair (I mean, my “observatory”), here’s how I reckon it: If you had a 747 with a lot of gas in it, you could fly around the Earth in a little under two days.

But if you lived on Jupiter and caught an Air Jupiter 747 flight around the planet, it would take three weeks for the orbit. Can you imagine that? Especially in coach class, with some restless kid behind you kicking your seat the entire time, while the lonely lady next to you tells you about her emotional journey through life as she shows you pictures of her cats.

If Jupiter is a remarkably big giant, he’s also a remarkably fast one. Jupiter manages to spin around once every 10 hours. Compare that to the relatively pokey 24 hours for pipsqueak Earth. Since Jupiter is spinning so fast, the gases that comprise the visible layer separate themselves into bands, some of which apparently are spinning in the opposite direction, and if you’d like to know why that is, well, don’t look at me. I’m just a guy in a lawn chair.

So far, 63 moons have been counted for Jupiter, including the most visible and well-known four that are called the Galilean moons, so named for Galileo. One of the moons, Io, is like something out of a science fiction book, and instead of being just a idle hunk of pocked-up rock, it is home to active volcanoes that spew plumes hundreds of miles high. I don’t know who is better suited to contemplate such astronomical weirdness, Carl Sagan or Cheech & Chong and, well, there I go with those ’70s references again.

Anyway, Jupiter: It’s awesome.