The original question was: I have heard Jupiter referred to as a failed star. That if the cosmic chaos of the early solar system had worked out a little different, and Jupiter had gotten a bit more mass, it might have been able to light the fusion engine and become a star.
Two questions.
How close was Jupiter to becoming a star?
If something really big slammed into Jupiter today, could it trigger nuclear fusion?
Ok and a third question. If Jupiter did in fact get slammed with something big enough to trigger nuclear fusion, and it became a star, how long would it take to substantially alter the ability for earth to sustain life as we know it?
Physicist: That is a really cool question!
I heard the same thing a while ago, but Jupiter is a long way from being a star. That estimate was based on some old nuclear physics (like 1980′s old). By being awesome, and building neutrino detectors and big computers, we’ve managed to refine our understanding of stellar fusion a lot in the last few decades.
Although the material involved (how much hydrogen, how much helium, etc.) can change the details, most physicists (who work on this stuff) estimate that you’d need at least 75-85 Jupiter masses to get fusion started. By the time a planet is that large the lines between planet, brown dwarf (failed star), and star gets a little fuzzy.
So, for Jupiter to become a star you’d need to slam so much additional mass into it, that it would be more like Jupiter slamming into the additional mass.
If you were to replace Jupiter with the smallest possible star it would have very little impact here on Earth.
There’s some debate over which star is the smallest star (seen so far). OGLE-TR-122b, Gliese 623b, and AB Doradus C are among the top contenders (why is every other culture better at naming stars?), and all weigh in around 100 Jupiters. They are estimated to be no more than 1/300th, 1/60,000th, and 1/1,000th as bright as the Sun respectively. So, lets say that Jupiter suddenly became “OGLupiter” (replaced by OGLE-TR-122b, the brightest of the bunch, and then given the worst possible name). It would be a hundred times more massive, 20% bigger, a hell of a lot denser, and about 0.3% as bright as the Sun.
At it’s closest Jupiter is still about 4 times farther away from us than the Sun, so OGLupiter would increase the total energy we receive by no more than about 1 part in 5 thousand (about 0.02%). This, by the way, is much smaller than the 6.5% yearly variation we get because of the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit (moving closer and farther away from the Sun over the course of a year). There would be effectively zero impact on Earth’s life.
There are examples of creatures on Earth that use the moon for navigation, so maybe things would eventually evolve to use OGLupiter for navigation or timing or something. But it’s very unlikely that anything would die.
OGLupiter would be around 80 times brighter than a full moon at its brightest, so for a good chunk of every year, you’d be able to read clearly at night. It would be very distinctively red (being substantially colder than the Sun), and it would be clearly visible even during the day.
What if all of the outer planets were collide with jupiter. Would that be enough to start the fusion process or is it that far away from becoming a star?
It’s that far away. Even with the other planets Jupiter’s mass wouldn’t even double.
would OGLupiter have an effect on Mars and Saturn? if so what type of changes would we possibly see?
I read that Gliese 710, an Orange Dwarf star, is on course to arrive at our Solar System in 1.5 million years, at its closest approach. Since Orange Dwarf stars are the most coveted of all stars for sustaining life in habitable zones, will it provide the mass needed to turn Neptune, Jupiter, etc. into Stars? Could their satellite moons become unlocked and begin rotating around the new star, forming mini-Solar Systems in our Galaxy? For example, Saturn and Uranus would become mini-Solar Systems, possibly breaking away from our Solar System? Vadim Bobylev, 2010.
Thank you.
It’s expected to pass well outside the solar system, but even if it passed well inside of our solar system it wouldn’t add mass to anything. Instead, it would just muck things up and throw things around.
Wouldn’t OGLupiter’s increased gravitational field mess with our orbit, eather pulling us farther away from the sun thus shifting our climate or causing orbital resonance between the sun, us and OGLupiter? Also what about OGLupiter’s magnetic fields, what effects would those have?
Thanks
That’s something I forgot to consider in the post, but that got brought up pretty early in the comment thread. Jupiter being 10 times more massive would put the solar system’s center of mass neatly between the Sun and the Earth’s orbit, which would make our present orbit very unstable.
It’s pretty unlikely that OGLupiter’s magnetic field would change much here on Earth. Both the Sun and Jupiter already have mammoth magnetic fields, and they don’t affect us too much.
Am doing a study on Jupiter and some of my finding give the impression of what is on course to our solar system in respect to history and future of the celestial bodies within our solar system. Jupiter is not dwarfed or retarded as some opinions suggest, but what is actually seen is an advanced level of cooling to which our own sun is heading to. Now this may sound absurd but one needs to do a lot of research on many things not only in cosmology or astronomy. Nature exists in family pertains. Decerning this will certainly take quiet some sacrifice.
I remember seeing an interesting scenario in a Czech TV popular astronomy series, “Okna vesmíru dokořán” (Windows of the Universe Wide Open). When the Sun becomes a red giant, it would expand so much that it would destroy the inner planets of the solar system, including the Earth and Mars, but Jupiter might actually collect enough matter from the expanding Sun by moving through the Sun’s atmosphere that it would become a red dwarf star.
Do you think this could be possible (perhaps if Jupiter were closer to the Sun, where Mars or the Earth is now)?
Probably not. Jupiter is a long way from stardom.