Jupiter candidate sites had little or no possibility of being the results of the proposed impacts. More recent discoveries include the following: Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a giant planet with a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun, but two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined. Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants; the other two giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants. Jupiter has been known to astronomers since antiquity. It is named after the Roman god Jupiter. When viewed from
Jupiter to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, and sometimes also Jupiter-mass gas giants close to their star. Earth and its neighbor planets may have formed from fragments of planets after collisions with Jupiter destroyed those super-Earths near the Sun. As Jupiter came toward the inner Solar System, in what theorists call the grand tack hypothesis, gravitational tugs and pulls occurred causing a series of collisions between the super-Earths as their orbits began to overlap. Jupiter moving out of the inner Solar System would have allowed the formation of inner planets, including Earth. Jupiter is composed primarily of gaseous