Guardian

You may know what this is.

It is Jupiter, a massive gas giant planet that could have been a star and shares some characteristics.

It's like a mini solar system, with nearly 40 moons and the four big ones, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are bigger than our moon, worlds unto themselves.

Jupiter looks cool through a telescope, though you'd need a big one to resolve details on the moons. In my telescope, they are bright points of light.

Why is it a guardian? It's powerful gravity can deflect, pull in, or fling away a comet heading into the inner solar system. It stabilizes the orbit of the asteroid belt and Mars.

It is in the sky in the evenings now, a bright dot that doesn't flicker like stars do, no planet does.

I like to watch video taken by Voyager 1 and Galileo of the clouds writhing and moving along like a roiling current in an endless sea.

I remember a month after I graduated high school, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and hit Jupiter. It was cataclysmic, a fireball more massive than the Earth.

Imagine what that would do if it hit our world.

Thanks to our guardian, it did not.