“Just when we think we understand Jupiter… it rewrites the rules of our entire Solar System.”
Bigger than all the planets combined, wrapped in violent storms, harboring metallic oceans and hidden magnetic anomalies—Jupiter sits like a cosmic riddle that refuses to be solved.

Every year, new discoveries force scientists to rethink what they believed about planetary formation, gravity, and even Earth’s survival.

Stranger still, Jupiter’s moons keep multiplying, its storms behave like living creatures, and its gravity both protects our planet… and threatens it.

Could the giant be reshaping the Solar System in ways we’re only beginning to understand? What secrets lie in its depths—and what dangers lurk there?

Jupiter has always stood as the Solar System’s undisputed king, but the more scientists study it, the clearer it becomes that this gas giant is far stranger—and far more influential—than anyone once imagined.

Just recently, astronomers discovered 12 new moons, bringing Jupiter’s total to 92, the most of any planet.

Many of these tiny worlds roam far from the planet, moving against Jupiter’s rotation—strong evidence they are captured asteroids pulled in by Jupiter’s immense gravity.

For years, people believed Jupiter served as Earth’s cosmic shield, saving us from deadly impacts.

And in some cases, that’s true.

Long-period comets—racing in from the distant Oort Cloud—are often kicked out of the Solar System entirely thanks to Jupiter’s gravitational slingshot.

But the giant world is not only our protector—it is also our potential destroyer.

Modern simulations show Jupiter’s gravity disrupts the asteroid belt, nudging rocky bodies into unstable resonant zones.

These gravitational disturbances send debris spiraling inward toward the Sun—and occasionally toward Earth.

The close brush with Lexell’s Comet in 1770, which passed within a cosmic hair’s breadth of our planet, likely happened because Jupiter altered its orbit.

If Jupiter were only one-fifth its current mass, these destabilizing effects would still exist—but the planet would lose its ability to remove threats from the Solar System.

In that alternate scenario, Earth’s impact rate would skyrocket, making life as we know it nearly impossible.

But Jupiter’s mysteries only deepen as we dive into its atmosphere.

Water vapor has long been confirmed on the planet, and recent observations from the Juno spacecraft revealed that water makes up about 0.25% of the atmosphere above the equator.

That may sound tiny—but on a planet over twice as massive as all other planets combined, that small percentage represents oceans worth of water.

Even Jupiter’s lightning defies expectations.

Some bolts are 100 times brighter than lightning on Earth, and they form in places where liquid water shouldn’t exist.

The key lies in ammonia, which acts as antifreeze.

Water ice crystals combine with ammonia vapors to create slushy droplets that grow into huge “mushballs.”

These electrical collisions generate lightning—even in regions at a freezing –87°C.

Travel deeper into Jupiter, and ordinary physics starts to break down.

For decades, scientists believed Jupiter contained a dense rocky core.

But recent Juno data revealed something startling: Jupiter’s core is diluted, not solid, and consists of only 18% rocky materials.

The rest is dominated by a bizarre substance called liquid metallic hydrogen, created under pressures and temperatures so extreme that hydrogen behaves like a shimmering metal.

This 40,000-km-deep layer functions as a planetary dynamo, generating a magnetic field so vast it stretches 725 million km across space.

This magnetic field isn’t stable, either.

Jupiter’s Great Blue Spot—a magnetic anomaly—appears like a second south pole near the equator, and its intensity changes by 1% every year.

Juno has revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic field is more chaotic, more violent, and more unpredictable than Earth’s ever could be.

And yet, Jupiter’s odd behaviors don’t stop with storms or magnetism.

The planet doesn’t actually orbit the Sun in the way smaller planets do.

Instead, both Jupiter and the Sun orbit a shared center of gravity—a point in space located just above the Sun’s surface.

This subtle wobble influences everything from comet trajectories to the overall balance of the Solar System.

From here, the strangeness extends outward to Saturn, whose own mysteries continue to unfold.

Saturn’s rings—iconic and majestic—are surprisingly young, only 100 to 400 million years old.

Worse still, they are disappearing.

Every 30 minutes, Saturn loses enough ring material to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

Charged particles, solar radiation, and micrometeor impacts create “ring rain”—a cascade of icy material falling into the atmosphere, altering Saturn’s chemistry.

Saturn’s moons, however, may be the true gems of the outer Solar System.

Titan possesses lakes, rain, dunes, and an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s.

Its methane cycle mimics Earth’s water cycle almost perfectly.

Researchers have even found that it snows methane and that Titan experiences seasonal storms and vast equatorial cloud formations.

Meanwhile, Enceladus sprays water ice from its subsurface ocean into space, creating the E-ring.

Some of this “moon rain” falls back onto Saturn.

Enceladus remains one of the top candidates for extraterrestrial life, and upcoming missions may finally reveal whether microbial life swims beneath its icy crust.

Turning inward, Mercury—the smallest planet—is a world of contradictions.

Despite baking in the Sun’s glare, it hides water ice inside permanently shadowed craters.

Mercury may have once been much larger before a violent collision sheared off most of its crust.

Its massive, shrinking iron core still generates a magnetic field, producing colossal “magnetic tornadoes” that scrape material from the surface into space.

And then there’s Mars.

Once considered a dry wasteland, it now reveals ancient rivers, lakebeds, hydrothermal systems, waves etched into rock, and even modern glaciers hiding under dust near the equator.

Rovers continue detecting organic molecules, sedimentary deposits, and minerals associated with water.

Snow falls at the poles.

Dust storms rage like dragon breath.

Each discovery brings us closer to answering the question that has haunted humanity for centuries:
Was Mars once alive—and could it be again?