With the formation of the solar system, Jupiter also grew into the behemoth we see today, with a mass 2.5 times greater than the mass of the other planets in the solar system combined, but its formation process is still a mystery. Until recently, Juno discovered that Jupiter’s interior is full of microplanetary remnants, suggesting that the planet devoured large numbers of baby planets to feed itself.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Like other planets, it started by accreting rocky material. When the core became super dense, it began to suck in a large amount of gas (mainly hydrogen and helium) from more distant places, and finally formed a gas giant planet. While telescopes have taken thousands of images of the vortices in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, these storms prevent us from seeing what’s below, and we still know very little about Jupiter’s inner workings.
There are currently 2 theories debating how Jupiter accreted rocky material in the first place, one is that Jupiter accumulated billions of smaller space rocks, which astronomers call pebbles (though these rocks are closer in size to boulders than real pebbles) ; the other argues that Jupiter’s core comes from absorbing many planetesimals, and a new study supports that argument.
Using data from NASA’s Juno and Galileo probes to construct Jupiter’s core model, researchers found that the rocky material accreted by Jupiter contains 11-30 Earth-mass heavy elements, accounting for about 3-9% of Jupiter’s own mass, more than expected. A lot more. If Jupiter was formed by accreting pebbles, then the core would end immediately if it got too big, because the growing gas layer would create a pressure “barrier” that prevented more pebbles from being pulled into the planet’s interior, so a single Such high concentrations of heavy elements cannot be explained by the pebble accretion theory.
Conversely, if Jupiter had been accreting planetesimals (that is, developing baby planets), the gravitational pull of the core pulling on the rock would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas, allowing it to accumulate the high concentrations of heavy elements observed today.
Determining how Jupiter forms has important knock-on effects for other planets, as the origins of other giant planets such as Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, etc. may follow similar rules, and if other giant planets also formed by swallowing microplanets rather than pebbles, their metal abundances also Possibly higher than past estimates.
The new paper is published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
(Source of the first image: pixabay)
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