Jupiter's Violent Beauty: Juno's Most Extraordinary Discoveries

Jupiter is, by any measure, the dominant object in our solar system after the Sun. Its mass exceeds that of all other planets combined, and it contains more than 1,300 Earth volumes. But until the Juno spacecraft arrived in orbit in July 2016, we had never had a sustained close look at the planet's poles, never penetrated the clouds with microwave instruments to see how deep the weather systems go, never heard its auroras in radio wavelengths. What Juno found was not the stripped-down gas giant of physics textbooks but something far wilder — a planet of spectacular chaotic beauty, with storm systems that descend hundreds of kilometres into its atmosphere and auroras so intense they make Earth's seem like candles next to a bonfire.