What lies beneath: Nasa’s Juno spacecraft gazes deep inside Jupiter’s swirling interior

The interior of Jupiter is just as intriguing as the planet’s dazzling surface, with a swirling mixture of liquid hydrogen and helium at its centre, vast atmospheric jet streams and exotic gravitational properties, scientists said on Wednesday.

Data from Nasa’s Juno spacecraft, orbiting the solar system’s largest planet since 2016, is providing researchers with what they called unprecedented insight into Jupiter’s internal dynamics and structure. Until now, scientists have had scant information about what lies below Jupiter’s thick red, brown, yellow and white clouds.

“Juno is designed to look beneath these clouds,” said planetary science professor Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led part of the research using Juno’s new measurements of Jupiter’s gravity.

“On Jupiter, a gaseous planet without a solid surface, we can only gather information from orbit,” added aerospace engineering professor Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome, who also led part of the research.

Jupiter is a type of planet called a gas giant, as opposed to rocky planets like Earth and Mars, and its composition is 99 per cent hydrogen and helium. Juno’s data showed that as you go deeper under the surface, Jupiter’s gas becomes ionised and eventually turns into a hot, dense metallic liquid.