Does Jupiter protect Earth?

Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system and because of that its gravitational pull is also very high. Because of its high gravitational force, Jupiter has done many favors to our planet. It helps to keep asteroids away from bombarding to Earth, and protects our planet. One French scientist called Pierre-Simon Laplace found that a comet which was heading towards earth’s surface got into Jupiter’s gravitational field and got expelled from earth’s direction. Like this Jupiter act as a protector of our planet and our lives.

Jupiter is the fifth planet, if we consider the distance from Sun. It is a huge planet which has a mass of about one-thousandth that of the Sun, and 2.5 times the total mass of all other planets in the Solar System. Jupiter has been known to astronomers since ancient times and the Romans named the planet after their god Jupiter. It is the 3rd brightest object in the night sky after the Venus and Moon. Jupiter is composed primarily of gaseous and liquid matter. It’s atmosphere is made up of 24% of helium and 75% of hydrogen and the remaining mass consists of other elements. The atmosphere has small amounts of ammonia, methane, water vapor, and silicon-based compounds. There are also traces of carbon, hydrogen sulfide, ethane, neon, phosphine, oxygen, and sulfur. The outermost layer of the atmosphere consists of frozen ammonia in crystalline form. The interior of the planet contains denser materials. It lacks a well-defined solid surface and because of its high speed rotation, shape of the planet is that of an oblate spheroid with a noticeable bulge around the equator. It has a diameter of 142,984 km at its equator and the average density of Jupiter, 1.326 g/cm3. The outer atmosphere of Jupiter is segregated into different bands at different latitudes, which creates turbulence and storms along interacting boundaries of atmospheric layers. In 17th Century, a giant storm was observed on Jupiter surface which is known as the Great Red Spot. There is a faint planetary ring system around Jupiter and also there is a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter has at least 69 moons and Ganymede is the largest.
Jupiter is very big when compared to Earth but it is less dense. Volume of Jupiter is about 1,321 times Earths, but it mass is only 318 times higher. A “Jupiter mass” is used as a unit to describe masses of objects, like extra solar planets and brown dwarfs. Jupiter has a core which contains mixture of elements, and core is surrounded by a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen with some helium, and there is an outer layer which consists of molecular hydrogen. Detailed information about the core is not known.

The Great Red Spot is a zone of high pressure on Jupiter, which causes an anticyclone storm on the planet. The Great Red Spot region is bigger than The Earth. This storm is stable and a permanent feature of the planet but, it has significantly decreased in size since its discovery.