The Full History of Jupiter: The Planet That Came First

Before the Earth existed, Jupiter was already here. Isotopes in iron meteorites suggest its core formed within about the first million years of the solar system, splitting the young disk in two. This is the full history of the biggest planet: how it formed, whether it wandered toward the Sun and back, why it is not a failed star, whether it shields the Earth or sends comets our way, and what Galileo's telescope, Pioneer, Voyager, the Galileo spacecraft, Juno and now Europa Clipper have found. Europa Clipper makes its last Earth gravity assist on 3 December 2026, on its way to Jupiter in April 2030. WHAT YOU ARE SEEING • Spacecraft images, telescope images and NASA visualizations are credited on screen. Source audio and music from NASA videos are not used. • Scenes labelled ILLUSTRATION, SCHEMATIC or RECONSTRUCTION were made by Shadowfetch Studio in Blender and Unreal Engine. They are not mission footage. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts, the forming disk, the Grand Tack, Jupiter's interior and Europa's ocean are models or reconstructions, labelled on screen. • Diagrams are original and not to scale. • The narration is a synthetic voice (Kokoro). The music is an original procedural score. No AI-generated imagery is used. NASA does not endorse this video. • Ideas presented as hypotheses (the Grand Tack, Jupiter as Earth's shield, the origin of the dilute core) are still debated by scientists. KEY SOURCES Jupiter's age: Kruijer et al. 2017, PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1704461114 Grand Tack: Walsh et al. 2011, Nature 475:206 51 Pegasi b: Mayor & Queloz 1995, Nature 378:355 Jupiter friend or foe: Horner & Jones 2008, Int. J. Astrobiology (arXiv:0806.2795) Europa's ocean: Kivelson et al. 2000, Science 289:1340 Polar cyclones: Adriani et al. 2018, Nature 555:216 Shallow lightning: Becker et al. 2020, Nature 584:55 Shoemaker-Levy 9, Galileo, Voyager, Pioneer, Juno: NASA/JPL mission pages Europa Clipper: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/euro... Juno: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/juno/ Moon count (115, 9 April 2026): JPL Solar System Dynamics satellite list CHAPTERS 00:00 Channel opening 00:10 The planet that came first 01:43 How do you build a giant? 03:19 The star that never was 05:20 Did Jupiter wander? 08:09 Shield or slingshot? 10:52 The asteroids that follow Jupiter 12:45 Four new worlds, 1610 14:43 First close encounters 17:01 Into the clouds 19:12 Inside the giant 22:11 The ocean moons 24:25 The next visitors 26:21 What Jupiter means for us CREDITS Images and visualizations: NASA; NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio; NASA, ESA and STScI (Hubble), incl. A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), J. DePasquale (STScI), H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI); NASA/JPL-Caltech and NASA/JPL; NASA Ames Research Center; NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (Juno); Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark); Public domain. CC BY image processing: Great Red Spot: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill; Jupiter, Io and Europa: enhanced image by Roman Tkachenko, based on images courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (CC BY). Jupiter globe texture: Cassini map PIA07782, NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Earth: NASA Blue Marble. No source audio or music from NASA videos is used. Full item-by-item credits accompany the production package. #Jupiter #NASA #SpaceDocumentary #EuropaClipper #Astronomy