Look out for an episode of The Planets, titled The Godfather: Jupiter, available now on iPlayer.
In classical mythology, the god Jupiter surrounded himself in clouds to keep his antics hidden from view. Only his wife, Juno, could see through the veil to his true nature. And so it is with the NASA spacecraft of the same name. The secrets of the formation of the whole Solar System lie below Jupiter’s all-encompassing clouds, just waiting to be discovered. Theories about our Solar System formation all begin with the collapse of a giant cloud of gas and dust, otherwise known as a nebula, the majority of which formed the Sun. Like the Sun, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, so it too must have formed early on, capturing most of the…