<P> In Germanic mythology, Jupiter is equated to Thor, whence the English name Thursday for the Roman dies Jovis . </P> <P> In the Central Asian - Turkic myths, Jupiter is called Erendiz or Erentüz, from eren (of uncertain meaning) and yultuz ("star"). There are many theories about the meaning of eren . These peoples calculated the period of the orbit of Jupiter as 11 years and 300 days . They believed that some social and natural events connected to Erentüz's movements on the sky . </P> <P> The observation of Jupiter dates back to at least the Babylonian astronomers of the 7th or 8th century BC . The ancient Chinese also observed the orbit of Suìxīng (歲星) and established their cycle of 12 earthly branches based on its approximate number of years; the Chinese language still uses its name (simplified as 岁) when referring to years of age . By the 4th century BC, these observations had developed into the Chinese zodiac, with each year associated with a Tai Sui star and god controlling the region of the heavens opposite Jupiter's position in the night sky; these beliefs survive in some Taoist religious practices and in the East Asian zodiac's twelve animals, now often popularly assumed to be related to the arrival of the animals before Buddha . The Chinese historian Xi Zezong has claimed that Gan De, an ancient Chinese astronomer, discovered one of Jupiter's moons in 362 BC with the unaided eye . If accurate, this would predate Galileo's discovery by nearly two millennia . In his 2nd century work the Almagest, the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus constructed a geocentric planetary model based on deferents and epicycles to explain Jupiter's motion relative to Earth, giving its orbital period around Earth as 4332.38 days, or 11.86 years . In 499, Aryabhata, a mathematician--astronomer from the classical age of Indian mathematics and astronomy, also used a geocentric model to estimate Jupiter's period as 4332.2722 days, or 11.86 years . </P> <P> In 1610, Galileo Galilei discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter (now known as the Galilean moons) using a telescope; thought to be the first telescopic observation of moons other than Earth's . One day after Galileo, Simon Marius independently discovered moons around Jupiter, though he did not publish his discovery in a book until 1614 . It was Marius's names for the four major moons, however, that stuck--Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto . These findings were also the first discovery of celestial motion not apparently centered on Earth . The discovery was a major point in favor of Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the motions of the planets; Galileo's outspoken support of the Copernican theory placed him under the threat of the Inquisition . </P>

Who discovered jupiter and when was it discovered
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