Jupiter

The fifth planet from the Sun

The largest planet, Jupiter holds more than twice the mass of all the other planets put together, and eleven Earths would fit across its equator. It has no surface: what you see are the tops of clouds of ammonia ice, drawn into bands by winds of up to 150 m/s, over an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium that grows denser all the way down.

It turns faster than any other planet, once in under ten hours, fast enough to flatten it visibly at the poles. The map shown here was assembled from images taken by NASA's Cassini probe as it flew past in December 2000 on its way to Saturn, so this is Jupiter as it looked then. Its clouds change from year to year, but the Great Red Spot, a storm wider than Earth followed since the nineteenth century, is still there.