Sevenoaks Catalyst Magazine - Energy Edition Issue 1 - Lent 2020 | Page 14

JUPITER THE FAILED STAR In — Ansh Soni 1995, the Galileo space craft arrived at Jupiter. It studied the planet for 8 years and by the end it was almost falling apart. Some scientists worried that it would crash into Jupiter and its plutonium reactor would create reaction with the hydrogen on Jupiter that would result in a second Sun. As a result, Jupiter is often referred to as a ‘failed star’. This is not wholly accurate, due to two things: Jupiter was formed in a completely different way to stars; rather than from the collapse of interstellar dust clouds, Jupiter was formed from comet sized bodies of ice a rock named ‘planetesimals’ colliding and accumulating into a planet. Secondly, despite its size, Jupiter is nowhere near big enough to create fusion that all stars do to be classed as a star. There are two types of stars that Jupiter can become. To become a Brown Dwarf Jupiter needs to become 13 times bigger than itself. And to become and main sequence star like our sun, it needs to become 70 times bigger than itself. Anyways, for the kind of reaction to turn Jupiter into a star, there would need to be a star’s worth of hydrogen – which the atmosphere of Jupiter does not contain. But adding mass to Jupiter will not make it bigger. In fact, Jupiter would shrink if you added mass. The atoms in its centre are about as crammed together as atoms can be before they lose their electrons and are occupying high states of kinetic energy. (This is known as degenerate matter). In that state increasing the mass, makes it smaller because the compression created by the extra mass is greater than the volume of the extra mass. Hypothetically, if Jupiter became a star at its current size, Earth would receive between 1-6% more energy and there would be a very bright star in the sky (but not brighter than the moon) However all the planets’ orbits would change massively, and some would even get flung out of the solar system! The two stars (Jupiter and The Sun) would be attracted (orbit each other) and all the planets would get attracted to Jupiter mid-orbit. But this won’t happen, so we should live a good life without worrying about getting flung into space.