JUPITER, THE GREATEST OF KNOWN WORLDS

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When we are thinking of worlds, and trying to exalt the imagination with them, it is well to turn to Jupiter, for there is a planet worth pondering upon! A world thirteen hundred times as voluminous as the earth is a phenomenon calculated to make us feel somewhat as the inhabitant of a rural village does when his amazed vision ranges across the million roofs of a metropolis. Jupiter is the first of the outer and greater planets, the major, or Jovian, group. His mean diameter is 86,500 miles, and his average girth more than 270,000 miles. An inhabitant of Jupiter, in making a trip around his planet, along any great circle of the sphere, would have to travel more than 30,000 miles farther than the distance between the earth and the moon. The polar compression of Jupiter, owing to his rapid rotation, amounts in the aggregate to more than 5,000 miles, the equatorial diameter being 88,200 miles and the polar diameter 83,000 miles.