After the TMA-2's compressed Jupiter into a star in Arthur C Clarke's 2010, would it have been a stable star

Question

If this could be done, would it work, would it be a sustainable reaction?

The TMA-2's turned Jupiter into a star by compressing the matter that was there not adding any. As a planet is compressed, its gravitational force goes up force = GMm/r^2 where r is the radius of the planet. As you can see, the smaller the radius the higher the gravity. If you make it small enough it will provide enough force to fuse hydrogen (which Jupiter has plenty of). Something similar was done in "Imperial Earth" when they created microscopic black holes. Ok, now that Jupiter has been compressed small enough to start a fusion reaction, would it be stable or just burn out rapidly. How long would it last?

Answer 1

No, it wouldn't have been stable. That stability is a balancing act between the fusion reactions in the star's core trying to expand it, and gravity trying to compress it. In a "star" the size of Jupiter, there's not enough mass to sustain the pressure needed for fusion reactions. Making Jupiter smaller would increase the surface gravity, but that wouldn't do it - once the external pressure was released Jupiter would expand and the core reactions would stop. After that I'd expect Jupiter to go through a period of expansion and contraction before it settled down.

Answer 2

Eventually--if you bulked it up enough. The only way to make Jupiter into a star would be to add enough mass to make it start fusing Hyrdogen into Helium. This would mean adding about 100 times the current mass of the planet. This would make a very small star, a red M8 or M9, barely bigger than a brown dwarf.

Assuming the mass was added somehow, there are several very important things to discuss. First, the star would have to settle onto the main sequence. The larger the star, the faster this happens. With our M8 or M9 star, the time would be very long, perhaps on the order of a billion years.

What would it be like before that? Well, stars don't just start fusing right away, they go through phases. First, the mass would try to collapse under it's own weight, but the heat caused by that collapse would decrease the density of the gas, making the gas expand again. Perhaps small amounts of fusion would take place, but it wouldn't be the big reaction that we are looking for. In fact, the protostar would continue to pulse like this, almost but not quite "lighting up" for some time. Then, when it finally did start fusing, it would be really hot, and would pulse for a much longer time as it settled toward hydrostatic equilibrium--that is, the heat and the gravity being balanced so that the star stops pulsing. According to sources that I have read, this process takes over a billion years for a star with such little mass. Hardly good if you want a steady burning star right from the getgo.

Second, adding all that mass would change the solar system barycenter. This is because the newly formed star would have significantly more mass than Jupiter, and it would pull on the Sun accordingly, making the Sun wobble noticeibly more in it's course. What effects this would have on earth are hard to describe, at best it would make the sun wander a little closer to the inner planets, giving them orbital speed and perhaps therby increasing thier eccentricity. That might put us in a position where we were much further and closer to the sun throughout the year than we had ever been. Not really a good thing, and that is the best case scenario. Worst case, the perturbation would be enough to cause Earth to destabilize and possibly get tossed out of the system altogether, along with the other planets, and that is assuming that earth didn't hit one of the others or the sun or Jupiter!

Third, Jupiter's Luminosity would add energy to the Earth. It wouldn't be much, but it would be so bright that we would be able to see it during the day. If our orbit survived, we might notice a small warming effect over time--But that wouldn't be the biggest issue, just a side note. The biggest issue would be the wild solar flares. Small stars seem to flare up violently, and the radiation from these violent flares might have important consequences for the earth's Ozone layer.

So, for the original question, yes, with enough mass, the new star would provide sustained fusion. If there was mass added. If not, the compression would maybe cause a brief flare up, followed by expansion and cooling right back down to being a Gas giant. The secret is all in the mass!

As to whether it could be done...If you were able to create a wormhole inside Jupiter, or near it, (assuming of course that one would be able to understand a wormhole and create one big enough for this operation) one might be able to insert enough matter, or simply drop an already existing brown dwarf into Jupiter's orbit--the addition of which would exceed the critical mass for fusion. If. We're talking about energy being unleashed here that could very well tear the entire solar system apart, if attempted.

If there was a way to get all that mass to Jupiter, It would work. The problem is that moving that much mass would be such a feat of engineering that we would only be able to see it as magic. The mechanism would be beyond comprehension (for us currently) and we do not have anywhere near the level of understanding of the universe to even be able to say whether the feat is even possible.

There may be other ways of bringing in matter, such as "beaming" it in through quantum teleportation or something, but again, beyond us.

compressing jupiter would require a mechanism, a black hole would lilkey rip the planet apart and pull it into sigularity, though the reaction would take forever due to relativity and the radiation would kill everything in the system (it would all be very high energy radiation). Forcing Jupiter, with it's mass only, into a position where it could sustain fusion would not be practical. There isn't much mass there, and you would have to try to control the entire thing as it rebounded due to compression heating.

In short, if you could add mass, yes, if not, no. Sorry everything else was so long winded.

Answer 3

I think the millions of slabs that appeared in Jupiter's atmosphere were adding matter. I'll check my copy of the book and/or movie and edit this if I am wrong.
EDIT
I don't have the book but I reviewed the movie. The slab vanishes and millions of others start appearing in Jupiter's atmosphere. Eventually the planet shrinks and ignites. But I still say the slabs added mass because, according to Wikipedia, "Jupiter is thought to have about as large a diameter as a planet of its composition can; adding extra mass would cause the planet to shrink due to increased gravitational compression. The process of further shrinkage with increasing mass would continue until stellar ignition was achieved."

Answer 4

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Answer 5

What I've read, Jupiter's mass is about 1/10 of enough to sustain a fusion reaction. If it had enough mass and enough available hydrogen, it would already be burning.

I always presumed that the whatchamathingies were either adding hydrogen mass to Jupiter or breaking down heavier elements into hydrogen...

Answer 6

Assuming sufficient mass were added to Jupiter, and assuming the total mass was initially (by far) hydrogen, it would be a very stable star. Stars with smaller masses take more time to convert their hydrogen to helium and energy compared to higher mass stars. Some very massive stars last only a few million years while some dwarf stars last many billions of years.

Answer 7

I don't think it would work.