Jupiter's moons helped show scientists the speed of light

Humanity has only known for a few centuries that the speed of light is finite. It's also a very
difficult thing to measure, because it is so fast. There are a few ways by which the speed of
light was eventually figured out, and one of them involved the planet Jupiter.

In the 1600s, Danish astronomer Ole Roemer helped solve a problem that had vexed
astronomers. Scientists had noticed that eclipse tables of Jupiter's moons were always 16
minutes and 40 seconds late when Jupiter was on the far side of the sun from the Earth.

In 1675, Roemer said this is because of the speed of light and correctly measured the
velocity as being more than 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km per second).

The Great Red Spot is shrinking

The Great Red Spot is a huge storm on Jupiter that has been raging for at least 400 years,
ever since telescopes first began looking at the planet. But since at least the 1930s, this
massive storm has been shrinking.

In 2014, images of the storm taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showed that it
measured 10,250 miles (16,500 km) across, or about half its when observed in the 1800s.
The storm also seems to be shrinking even faster as it gets smaller, which has astronomers
stumped.

"One possibility is that some unknown activity in the planet's atmosphere may be draining
energy and weakening the storm, causing it to shrink," Hubble officials said in a 2014
statement.

Jupiter can cast shadows on Earth

Some objects are so bright in the sky that they can cast shadows on the ground on Earth.
The sun and the moon are the most obvious examples, but under very dark skies, there
have been reliable reports that Venus can also cast shadows on Earth. Jupiter, however, is
not quite as bright in the night sky as Venus.
Astronomer Phil Plait, creator of the "Bad Astronomy" blog, wrote in 2011 that he did see
claims that Jupiter can cast shadows on Earth, but these were not proven until that year.
The evidence came from a 14-year-old Canadian amateur astronomer, Laurent V. Joli-
Coeur. The teenager created a sort of "Jupiterdial" (sundial shape) with a post to cast a
shadow. He aimed the rig at Jupiter and caught a shadow, even after rotating the
contraption a bit.

Joli-Coeur also pointed the rig away from Jupiter and saw no shadow, proving that the
planet itself had created the dark spots.

Jupiter is a handy spacecraft slingshot

Earthlings are really lucky to have Jupiter in the outer solar system. The planet provides a
handy method for passing spacecraft to pick up some speed on their journeys deeper into
the solar system.

Perhaps the most famous examples are the two Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s. Voyager
1 used Jupiter to change its direction and fly high above the solar system's ecliptic plane,
while Voyager 2 swung by the giant planet and kept going to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
during what was a once-in-a-lifetime alignment. Voyager 1 exited the solar system in 2013,
the first spacecraft to do so.

Other prominent Jupiter flybys include the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in the early 1970s
(the spacecraft stopped transmitting to Earth, but are still flying out of the solar system), the
Cassini-Huygens probe on its way to Saturn, and the New Horizons probe on its way to
Pluto.

If you're happy and you know it, the ancients credited

Jupiter
The word "jovial", which means "happy" or "joyful," has its roots in an alternative name for
Jupiter, "Jove." "Jovial" is a late 16th-century word that originally comes from the Latin word
"jovialis," meaning "of Jupiter." It was supposed to refer to the planet Jupiter's influence on a
person.
In ancient times, many civilizations believed the gods governed people's fates and also the
motions of the planets in the sky, so these civilizations named the visible-eye planets after
gods. Because Jupiter was big, bright and moved relatively slowly, some cultures named
the planet after the chief of their gods (such as Zeus in Greece, rebranded as Jupiter by the
ancient Romans).

Germanic culture called the gas giant "Thor," the god of thunder and lightning. The word
Thor is the root of the word "Thursday" (or "Thor's day"), meaning Jupiter is also tied to one
of the days of the week. In fact, all the visible-eye planets, as well as the sun and the moon,
are represented in the days of the week.

The ancient Babylonians used advanced math to track

Jupiter

The Babylonians were another ancient culture fascinated by Jupiter. In early 2016, science
historian Mathieu Ossendrijver published results in which heanalyzed a Babylonian
tablet created between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C., long held in the collection of the British
Museum in London.

Ossendrijver suggested this culture used a rudimentary form of integral calculus to track
Jupiter's path across the sky. Such use would predate the supposed invention of the
technique in medieval Europe. According to his analysis, the tablet has plots of Jupiter's
apparent decreasing velocity between the time Jupiter first appears on the horizon to 60
days later and 120 days later.

This was an abstract use of geometry that was not used by the ancient Greeks or other
cultures that tracked the sky in ancient times, the study said.

Jupiter sometimes moves backward in the sky

Intro7654321More
 Jupiter sometimes moves backward in the sky
Credit: NASA

Earth is one of the innermost planets of the solar system. This means that every so often, this
planet's orbit catches up to worlds that are traveling further away from the sun. Mars is the most
spectacular example. Even the ancients could clearly see the Red Planet moving backward in the
sky briefly during every orbital cycle.

For the most part, the ancients couldn't figure out why (most cultures put Earth at the center of
the universe), but that was explained when solar system models were adjusted to put the sun at
the center instead. It turns out that Jupiter also displays this so-called retrograde motion, because
it also orbits further out than Earth.

Each year on Earth, there is a period during which Jupiter moves westward in the sky by about
10 degrees as the Earth "catches up" in its orbit and then sails by.