is the lack of plasma a reason to why Jupiter isn't a star rather than a planet?

Question

stars the size of jupiter have been discovered in other systems in the universe, why esle didnt Jupiter become a star? the link below is on a star the size of jupiter.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7098

its a fact that Jupiter contains the least ammount of plasma Compared to other planets.

hmmm good point Gary

Answer 1

No. Jupiter does not have the mass to become a star.

Plasma has little to do with it. Plasma is a result of a star beginning fusion, and being born, not the other way around.

Answer 2

Jupiter's mass is far short of what is needed for a star to start nuclear fusion. It is however incredibly dense and compressed in it's interior, with the hydrogen turned into a liquid metal. Hot and dense as it's core is, it's nothing compared to even a small star, which can and do have 100 times Jupiter's mass crammed into a sphere half of it's diameter. White and brown dwarfs are even more compressed because there's no nuclear reactions operating inside to support them. Electrons bumping into each other supports them against their own gravity. The most massive white dwarfs can have 1.4 solar masses crammed into a sphere smaller than the Moon. The nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is at most 50 percent larger than Jupiter but has a luminosity 17,000 times less than the Sun's. This M6V red dwarf would be more than able to keep Jupiter corralled in orbit around it. So size is no way to tell a planet and a small star apart. Stars generate or did generate energy from nuclear fusion, planets do not. They radiate heat left over from their birth and radioactive elements inside them, but they cannot generate any sort of energy internally as a star does.

Answer 3

Wow, thanks for the link, interesting. Note that even though the diameter is only slightly larger than Jupiter's , its mass is 96 times that of Jupiter.

I cannot answer your question definitively; but the difference seems to me to be the fact that Jupiter includes mostly non-hydrogen matter, including a lot of metals, whereas this new micro-dwarf I presume is mostly hydrogen, which also fuses more readily than other elements. I guess hydrogen compresses much more readily under gravity?

Answer 4

As for why Jupiter failed to become a star—it probably had to do with the 'accident' of the sun grabbing most of the mass early in the formation of the solar system, while in other systems the mass was more equitably distributed. In binary star systems, for example, the masses of the stars are commonly roughly equal.

The consensus is that Jupiter formed in a very different manner than stars form, so that calling Jupiter a 'failed star' is misleading. Stars form directly from the collapse of dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Because of rotation, these clouds form flattened disks that surround the central, growing stars. After the star has nearly reached its final mass, by accreting gas from the disk, the leftover matter in the disk is free to form planets.

Jupiter is generally believed to have formed in a two-step process. First, a vast swarm of ice and rock 'planetesimals' formed. These comet-sized bodies collided and accumulated into ever-larger planetary embryos. Once an embryo became about as massive as ten Earths, its self-gravity became strong enough to pull in gas directly from the disk (core accretion). During this second step, the proto-Jupiter gained most of its present mass (a total of 318 times the mass of the Earth). Soon thereafter, the disk gas was removed by the intense early solar wind,.

Jupiter is called a failed star because it is made of the same elements (hydrogen and helium) as is the Sun, but it is not massive enough to have the internal pressure and temperature necessary to cause hydrogen to fuse to helium, the energy source that powers the sun and most other stars.

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Alternate proposal:

Concerns the discovery of two gas giants and two so-called super-Earths (big rocky planets), each orbiting a small red dwarf star. Near the super-Earths were more powerful stars that put out a lot of UV radiation, so the two planets could have formed by disk instability, and had their gaseous coverings stripped off by the UV. The planets without nearby massive stars would remain gas giants. Explained in terms of the core accretion model, the super-Earths formed too slowly to begin sucking in gas, whereas the gas giants got lucky, having grown a little faster.

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As for your question about Jupiter's plasma content compared to that of other planets:

SEE these links:

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:2yzRuLG_z6wJ:earthsci.org/fossils/space/mag/mag.html+plasma+jupiter+earth&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=132&gl=us

http://www.aldebaran.cz/astrofyzika/plazma/occurence_en.html


Earth’s magnetosphere: In the corotating plasmosphere the temperature of the particles is 1 eV, in the plasma tail is 1 up to 10 keV, with a particle concentration of 0.5 cm−3. The plasma tail elongates until a hundredfold of Earth’s radius and has a thickness of 20 Earth radii. The boundary of the magnetospheric layer separates the Earth’s magnetic field from its surroundings and has a particle concentration of 1 cm−3.

Jupiter’s magnetosphere is similar to the magnetospheres of the rest of the planets. Moreover, it has the so-called plasma torus. The volcanic activity of its moon Io throws away plasmas rich in sulfur, which along its entire trajectory creates an ample plasma torus. Jupiter's magnetosphere is ~1200 times larger than Earth's.

Saturn’s magnetosphere has also a plasma torus, similar to the one in Jupiter. Saturn’s plasma torus is the biggest plasma structure in the solar system [after the Sun itself and the spirally shaped plasma within the heliosphere]. It reaches from 15 times the radius of Saturn up to 25 times the radius of the planet. Inside the torus there are approximately 3000 particles per cm3.

Answer 5

No. The lack of sufficient mass is the reason Jupiter is not a star. Check, please, in any astronomy text for the diameter of Jupiter...now look at the diameter of the Sun...It is way larger, by several orders of magnitude.

Answer 6

There are thousands of planets in other solar systems that are bigger than Jupiter and they are not stars. It had to be in the middle.

Answer 7

Jupiter does not have a sustained fusion reaction at its core.