The smallest known main-order star in the Milky Way galaxy is the actual pixie of the object.
It is called EBLM J0555-57Ab, a red dwarf light00 light-years away. With an average radius of about,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, It forms the smallest known star to support hydrogen fusion in its core, a process that keeps the stars burning until they run out of fuel.
In our solar system, there is Two Objects larger than these teenage stars. There is a sun, obviously. The second Jupiter, like the giant scoop of ice cream, comes with an average radius of 69,911 kilometers.
So why is Jupiter a planet and not a star?
The short answer is simple: Jupiter does not have enough mass to fuse hydrogen into helium. EBLM J0555-57Ab, about 85 times the mass of Jupiter, can be as light as a star – if it were low, it would not be able to cut hydrogen. But if our solar system were different, could Jupiter appear in a star?
Jupiter and the Sun are more like one than you know
Gas may not be a giant star, but Jupiter is still a big deal. Its mass is 2.5 times that of all the other planets combined. It’s just that, being a gas giant, its actual density is low: about 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter; Earth’s density, 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter, is four times that of Jupiter.
But it is interesting to note the similarities between Jupiter and the Sun. The density of the sun is 1.41 grams per cubic centimeter. And the two objects are very similar creatively. By mass, the sun is about 71 percent hydrogen and 27 percent helium, the rest is composed of trace amounts of other elements. Jupiter is largely about 73 percent hydrogen and 24 percent helium.
Illustration of Jupiter and its lunar Io. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / CI Lab)
It is for this reason that Jupiter is sometimes called the failed star.
But it is still unlikely that, if left to the solar system’s own devices, Jupiter would also become close to becoming a star.
Stars and planets, you will see, are born by two very different methods. When stars are born when the g ense knot of material in an interstellar atomic cloud comes under its own gravity – puff! Fl phf! – As spinning it goes into a process called cloud collapse. As it spins, it spools into a stellar zeal disc in more material from the surrounding cloud.
As the mass – and therefore gravity – increases, the main part of the baby star becomes harder and harder, causing it to get hotter and hotter. Eventually it becomes very compressed and hot, the main burns and the thermonuclear fusion kicks in.
According to our understanding of star formation, once the star content is finished increasing, then a complete disk of aggregation is left. These planets are made up of.
Astronomers believe that, for gas giants such as Jupiter, the process (called gravitational pulling) begins with dust in small chunks of icy rock and disks. As they orbit a baby star, pieces of this material sticking to each other with static electricity begin to collide. Eventually, this growing swarm reaches a large number – about 10 people on Earth – that they can attract more and more gas from the surrounding disk by gravity.
From that point on, Jupiter gradually increased in its current mass – about 318 times the mass of the Earth, and 0.001 times the mass of the Sun. Once all its available material was cut off – which was completely removed from the mass required for hydrogen fusion – it stopped growing.
Therefore, Jupiter never grew high enough to become a star. Jupiter has the same structure as the Sun because it was not a ‘failed star’ but was formed from the same cloud of atomic gas that gave birth to the Sun.
(NASA / SRIRI / MSSS / Gerald Ixt2dt / Sean Doran / Flickr / CC-BY-0.0)
True failed stars
There is a separate class of objects that can be considered ‘failed stars’. These are brown dwarfs, and they fill the gaps between gas giants and stars.
Starting with about 13 times the mass of Jupiter, these substances are large enough to support core fusion – not of ordinary hydrogen, but of deuterium. This is also known as ‘heavy’ hydrogen; It is an isotope of hydrogen with protons and neutrons in the nucleus instead of just one proton. Its fusion temperature and pressure are lower than the fusion temperature and pressure of hydrogen.
Because it occurs at low mass, temperature and pressure, deuterium fusion is an intermediate step for stars to move towards hydrogen fusion, as it continues to increase mass. But some that objects never achieve that set; This is known as the brown dwarf.
For a short time after their existence was confirmed in 1995, it was unknown whether the Brown Dwarfs were underrising stars or extraterrestrial planets; But some studies have shown that they form just like stars when the cloud breaks instead of the main excitement. And some brown dwarfs are also below the mass for deuterium burning, obscured by planets.
Jupiter is exactly at the lower mass limit for the cloud to break; Cloud Crash The smallest mass of the object object is estimated to be about one Jupiter. So if Jupiter had formed from the collapse of the cloud, it could be considered a failed star.
But data from an old NASA probe suggests that, at least at one time, Jupiter had a solid core – and that the core is more consistent with the method of creating accretion.
Model Delling suggests that the upper limit of the planetary mass, formed by core attraction, is less than 10 times the mass of Jupiter – a few Jupiter people shy away from deuterium fusion.
Therefore, Jupiter is not a failed constellation. But thinking about why it is not can help us better understand how the universe works. Also, Jupiter is the wonder of a strippy, naughty, noisy butterscotch itself. And without it, we humans would not even exist.
That, however, is another story to be told a second time.
.
