Jupiter used to be twice as big as it is now — it could have held 2,000 Earths

The gas giant Jupiter may be a familiar sight in the night sky, but how it forms continues to remain a mystery.

Long before it became the giant planet we see today, Jupiter was even bigger and had a much stronger magnetic field, according to a new study that looked back in time to reveal what the world was like in its early years.

The new calculations, described in a paper published Tuesday (May 20) in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that just 3.8 million years after the solar system's first solid objects formed, Jupiter was twice its current size and had a magnetic field at least 50 times stronger than what we see today.