Editing Jupiter (section)

==Overview==
Humans have probably known of Jupiter since prehistoric times (since it being the 3rd brightest object in the night sky, behind [[Venus]] and (obviously) [[Luna|the Moon]], means it's pretty fucking hard to miss), though obviously they wouldn't know ''what'' it was for a long time. The first records we have of it being observed in any capacity come from Babylon in around 7-8,000 BC. (So around the time the [[Emprah]] was born, if you don't know your dates.) The ancient Chinese also based a bunch of shit off their observations of Jupiter's orbit of ~12 years, such as the well-known Chinese Zodiac - though a Hellenistic Greek astronomer would later narrow that orbit down to the scientifically-accurate 11.86 years, meaning [[Derp|the Zodiac is by now well out-of-sync with Jupiter]]. It's also one of the classical planets of alchemy, representing tin and being associated with Thursday.

Come the 17th century, and good ol' Galileo invented the telescope and chose to demonstrate it by looking at Jupiter. As such, he's credited with discovering that Jupiter has moons, among other things he saw with the nifty sight-extender. Others would continue in his footsteps (as he was unfortunately imprisoned for [[Heresy|going against Church dogma]]) and figure out a fuckton about the Solar System's overweight gasball. Around this time the famous Great Red Spot, a giant storm that dwarfs the Earth, started on Jupiter and has been raging ever since.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, and also the most massive by a large margin (having two-and-a-half times the mass of all the other planets combined). It's something of a gravitational bully, as it tugs on ''anything'' that dares to get even remotely close to its orbit. It's even believed that an early Jupiter is the reason why none of the inner solar system planets are gas giants themselves - it just ate most of the mass that could make them giants in the first place.