How Hot is Jupiter?
Written by Fraser Cain
Jupiter in visible and infrared
Apart from the Sun, Jupiter is the hottest place in the Solar System. Not on its surface, but deep down inside Jupiter, it gets pretty warm. How hot is Jupiter?
Jupiter is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium, held together by mutual gravity. At the very cloud tops of Jupiter, right at end edge of space, the temperature dips down to -148° C, or -234° F. But if you could dive down into Jupiter, you would experience a rise in temperature and pressure.
About 1,000 km down, the temperature and pressure would reach the point that the hydrogen gas in Jupiter becomes a liquid. Further down you would reach a phase transition region where the hydrogen takes on metallic properties. It's believed that this happens when the temperature reaches 10,000 K and the pressure is 200 GPa. This metallic hydrogen is magnetic and provides Jupiter with its intense magnetic field.
As you continue to descent into Jupiter, the temperatures continue to rise. If you could survive the journey, you would reach the central core of Jupiter, which could contain rocky material equivalent to several times the mass of the Earth, but compressed and heated into a liquid state. Astronomers estimate that the core of Jupiter reaches a temperature of 36,000 kelvin, with a pressure of 3,000 GPa or more.
If you think Jupiter's so hot it might become a star, think again. The core of the Sun reaches a temperature of 15.7 million kelvin, the point at which hydrogen atoms can fuse together into helium. Now that's hot.
We've written many articles about the temperature of planets for Universe Today. Here's an article about how hot Mercury is, and here's an article about how hot Venus is.
If you'd like more info on Jupiter, check out NASA's World Book on Jupiter. And here's a link to NASA's Solar System Exploration Guide.
Filed under: Astronomy
Tags: Jupiter, planet jupiter, temperature of jupiter
