Why is Jupiter the biggest planet in the solar system?
Jupiter's Cosmic Feast
Why is Jupiter the biggest planet in the solar system?
Line up all eight planets and one of them dwarfs the rest. Jupiter is so enormous that you could pour every other planet inside it and still have room to rattle them around. So how did one planet get to be the undisputed heavyweight champion? The answer starts long ago, with the dust that built everything.
About four and a half billion years ago, there were no planets at all — just a young Sun surrounded by a colossal spinning disk of gas and dust, like a flat pancake of cosmic crumbs. Every planet would be built out of this same swirling stuff. But where you stood in that disk decided what you could grab.
