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- Bringing happiness to life, Jupiter is the planet of enthusiasm, good
- fortune, big-heartedness, and success. Expressed in its positive form,
- Jupiter brings a zest for life and new experiences, good health,
- prominence, wealth, generosity, honesty, and plain old good luck.
- If Jupiter is afflicted (at odds with another planet in your horoscope),
- Jupiter's influence results in laziness, boastfulness, extravagance, and
- blind and misdirected optimism.
-
- Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, is the fifth planet
- from the Sun. Essentially a giant ball of hydrogen and helium gas, Jupiter
- has 1400 times the volume of Earth and 318 times the mass. Jupiter is
- roughly 5 times further from the Sun than earth and takes 11.9 years to
- make a complete orbit.
- Jupiter's most famous feature is the Great Red Spot, which is an
- anticyclonic storm which has raged in the atmosphere for centuries. The
- planet has at least 16 moons: the four largest were discovered in 1610
- by Galileo. They are named after the mythological paramours of Jupiter:
- Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Callisto. Callisto is almost as large as
- Mercury, and Ganymede is even larger than Mercury. Europa's extremely
- smooth surface is covered by a layer of water ice, and liquid water may
- lie beneath the ice. Io is hellish in comparison with intense volcanic
- activity and sulfur dioxide spewing from vents on the surface.
-
- Jupiter is named after the Roman mythological ruler of the gods (also
- known as Jove). The son of Saturn, Jupiter overthrew his father.
- Eventually identifying Jupiter with the Greek god Zeus, Roman literature
- assigned Zeus's attributes to Jupiter. But most Romans worshipped
- Jupiter in the old tradition as Jupiter, along with the goddesses
- Minerva and Juno, formed the primary religious triad of the Roman
- state.
-