Jupiter is supposed to be a star?

Question

I read somewhere that Jupiter originally started out becoming a star but ended up as we know it today. Has anyone else heard about that? Do you know any good sources so I can read up on this?

Answer 1

Antoine is close but has some facts messed up.

In our galaxy, there are planets, there are brown dwarfs, and there are stars. We have 8 good examples of planets in our solar system. A brown dwarf is a failed star - a large ball of mostly hydrogen and helium that never got hot enough in its core to start hydrogen fusion, but that is hot enough for some deuterium fusion. The maximum mass for a brown dwarf (and the minumum mass for a real star) is 0.08 times the mass of the Sun, or 80 times the mass of Jupiter. The minumum mass of a brown dwarf is not as well known, but most people put it at about 12 times the mass of Jupiter.

So if Jupiter was 12 times as massive as it is today, it would be a brown dwarf. It would need to be 80 times as massive as it is today to be a star.

Just for clarification, Jupiter is a planet, and it formed as a planet does (in the accretion disk around a star) and not as a star does. It was never a star, nor was it ever a failed star.

Search terms: brown dwarf, nuclear fusion, deuterium fusion, stellar mass limit, planet formation, star formation.

Answer 2

Jupiter can be considered an extremly small brown dwarf star, a star that never accumulated enough material to increase its internal pressure and heat to start hydorgen fusion. We call it a planet today because that is what the ancients called it. Actually it is somewhere between a planet and a brown dwarf. Through out the Universe there are all sizes of things from the very small to the very large. We just happen to have the ones that are in our soloar system. If Jupiter was big enough to become a full blown star, the soloar system would have developed very differently and there would be no earth, no life on earth and no you. Which might not be such a bad idea.

Answer 3

One of the reasons Jupiter didn't become a star, and ended up becoming a gas giant, is because it didn't have enough mass to burn. So if we were to increase the mass of Jupiter to the mass of our sun, I wonder what would happen... I can calculate it for you, and lets see what happens. We're going to use Newton's equation to calculate the theoretical gravitational pull between Earth and Jupiter with the same mass as the sun. The main variable between the sun and Jupiter will be the distance. F = G * m(1) * m(2) / r^2 F = gravitational force between the two objects G = universal gravitational constant (6.6726 x 10^-11) m(1) = mass of first object m(2) = mass of second object r = distance between the two objects. Lets start by calculating the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the sun. Lets define the variables: F = ? G = .000000000066726 m(1) = mass of sun (1.98892 × 10^30) m(2) = mass of Earth (5.9742 × 10^24) r = distance (149,668,992 km) so... F = (.000000000066726) (1.98892 x 10^30) (5.9742 x 10^24) / 149.668,992 ^2 Now we calculate O.o thats why we have google! I've found this website that will calculate this for us. The answer I got for the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Sun is: 35,393,906,237,200,000,000,000 newtons. Now we need to calculate it for Jupiter. The only things we need to change is the distance. This time we need to calculate it for the distance between Jupiter and Earth. r = 353,939,062,372 miles The answer is: 244,364,098,781,000,000,000 newtons Jupiter(sun) -and- Earth: 244,364,098,781,000,000,000 Sun -and- Earth: 35,393,906,237,200,000,000,000 As you can see, we would still be orbiting the sun, though Earth would take on an oblong shape because of the enormous gravitational force of the Jupiter star which has the same mass as our sun. All planets would heat up, and these extreme solar winds would blow the atmosphere of Earth and Mars away, and probably wiping out all life on Earth. Thank goodness Jupiter isn't a star! But an interesting question is, would these two stars orbit each other? That would wipe screw up everything in the solar system, but it would be interesting to study.

Answer 4

you're kind of right but not exactly

Jupiter is mostly made up of hydrogen, like a star

but it is too heavy to be one. It would have needed to be about 12 times more massive to work as a star. 12 times may seem like a lot but that means it "only" would have needed to start about 2.3x as big as it is today.

then of course because of that additional mass it would have contracted more, and started to function as a star when its core temperature grew high enough

basically the solar system is mostly made of the Sun (over 330'000 times more massive than the Earth), of Jupiter (nearly 318 times more massive than the Earth), and Saturn if you want to be nice, and the rest is just some leftover dust.

These 3 together account for 99.99% of the total mass of the Solar System. If you take only the Sun and Jupiter, you get to 99.96 percent of the total mass of the solar system.

Answer 5

Not quite, Jupiter was very close to becoming a star. It's too small to begin internal fusion but not by much. Many solar systems are binary, and our was close to becoming one as well.

Go to yahoo and type
jupiter star mass

you will see a couple of good hits about it.

Answer 6

Stars' brightnesses and lifespans are determined simply by how big they are. Chapter 9 of "Cosmos" gives perspective on that. Jupiter always was too small to be a star, so it is what it is. There's been a lot of planet heckling lately, Pluto has taken the worst, so good you brought this up. You're all right, Krissy.

Answer 7

Jupiter isn't a star it is a gas giant just like Saturn (that means it is made out of gas and you would fall through the planet)

Answer 8

Just as you were misinformed about viewing the moon at night, this peice of non-information probably came from somone with no knowledge of astronomy. Jupiter is a planet. It always has been and it always will be. Just remember that the movie: "2010" is, in fact, a movie and not real at all.

Answer 9

A star means a celestial body like our Sun. Stars are gaseous bodies which have no solid surface. Jupiter is also a gaseous body and appears to give off more light than it receives. For these reasons, astronomers suspect it may have been a star in the past.
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Answer 10

Unlike Earth which is mostly rock with a thin layer of gas making up the atmosphere, Jupiter is mostly a big ball of gas with possibly a small rock core. Also, Jupiter is MUCH bigger than Earth. In fact, if Jupiter were a little bigger, its own gravity could create enough pressure in its core to ignite nuclear fusion reactions, making it a star. So if Jupiter was little bigger than it is, it could have been a small dim star instead of a big planet.