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Could Jupiter have been a failed pair?
by jnordwick 9y ago
Could Jupiter have been a failed pair?
- gpvos 9y agoNot impossible, but rather unlikely. According to TFA, the partner star was much further out. Also, gas giant planets Jupiter's size are fairly common I thought (this knowledge may be outdated).
- pc2g4d 9y agoTFA? I'm getting "The Force Awakens". Or "Teach For America".
- detaro 9y ago"The F…ine Article"
- hinkley 9y agoThe Friendly Article, good sir.
- civilian 9y agoThe Feline article?
- dotancohen 9y agoThe Fine Article
- dotancohen 9y agoThe Fine Article
- trafficlight 9y agoThe Fucking Article
- AckSyn 9y agoAlso synonymous with RTFM, read the Fn manual. Or my favorite: "read the manual. The F is silent"
- Mz 9y agoIt seems to be a discussion board internet meme. I am not sure of the actual history, but my impression is that it started as "Did you read the fucking article?" which is sometimes rebutted with "Yes, I read the fucking article." and then "read the fucking article" became RTFA and now some people use TFA to mean The Fucking Article. (Or maybe people more polite than me always used RTFA rather than writing it out. I have quite the terrible potty mouth. shrug)
- pavement 9y ago...and RTFA borrows from the older RTFM (which of course pairs with TFM), and "M" indicating the Manual, or rather Instructions Manual, harkening back to the "man" command in Unix. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM
- tripzilch 9y agoin this context it's usually just intended to mean "the featured article". like "OP" on message boards.
- andrewflnr 9y agoI read it as The Feature Article, which looks dumber written out than it did in my head. You know, like Feature Presentation.
- gpvos 9y agoThe Featured Article. (There are echoes of another F-word in there, mostly from the older abbreviation RTFM, but they are rather faint.)
- poizan42 9y agoWell, it's the first result on urban dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA
- biehl 9y agoThe Fine Article
- jamiek88 9y agoIt used to be thought that it was a 'failed star', but you’d need at least 75-85 Jupiter masses to get fusion started it turns out so no, it wasn't close to being a star.
- mee_too 9y agoDon't think so, it's too small.
- jansho 9y agoWell what do you know, Jupiter doesn't actually orbit the sun! Not properly anyway http://www.iflscience.com/space/forget-wha-you-heard-jupiter-does-not-orbit-the-sun/ http://www.iflscience.com/space/forget-wha-you-heard-jupiter...
- libeclipse 9y agoA better source than IFLS?
- ngoldbaum 9y agoThis is silly semantics. Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system. The article is making the point that for Jupiter and the Sun this point happens to be just outside the surface of the Sun. It's much simpler to say "Jupiter orbits the Sun" than "Jupiter and the Sun both orbit the center of mass of the Jupiter-Sun system". You can think of the former as a shorthand for the latter.
- jansho 9y agoBut doesn't this show that the main players of the solar system are the sun and Jupiter? Apologies for the source, and my clear lack of knowledge in astronomy.
- theoh 9y agoAll planets orbit the centre of mass of themselves and the local star, modulo interactions with other planets. The position of the centre of mass relative to the surface of the star is completely immaterial. NB for smaller bodies, Jupiter is involved in perturbing or capturing their orbits to a great extent -- but we could conceivably have several very large planets contributing to that dynamic. Yes, Jupiter is the largest planet.
- fwefwwfe 9y agoThey are the two most massive, so that is tautologically true...
- 9y ago
- Razengan 9y agoRelated question(s): Do stars ever look like Jupiter/gas-giant planets at some point during their formation? Can planets like Jupiter "pull in" enough matter to "ignite" and become stars in the future?
- dotancohen 9y agoExcluding the Sun, there is not enough mass in the entire solar system to ignite Jupiter. Therefore, barring interaction with another star system, the answer is no.
- zhte415 9y agoIt does emit more radiation than it absorbs, which is star-like.
- simonh 9y agoBut it does so for completely different reasons - gravitational energy release due to gradual contraction rather than nuclear fusion.
- thaumaturgy 9y agoNo: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gnq8t/is_it_true_that_jupiter_is_a_failed_star/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gnq8t/is_it_tru... The question itself is weird; planets don't really "fail" to become something else. They simply accumulate mass during accretion, and either that mass (and other factors) is sufficient for ignition and sustained fusion, or not. It would be a little bit like asking if Neptune is a failed Jupiter or Mars was a failed Earth (hmm, perhaps a bad example). Jupiter is far, far too small to have been a candidate for a brown dwarf.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoNo, Jupiter is a planet not a star. Brown dwarfs start out well over a dozen times more massive than Jupiter. Planets form from a proto-planetary disk, as Jupiter did (you can tell because it is in the same orbital plane as the other planets, the same as the original plane of the disk). 99.9% the mass of the Solar System is in the Sun. 0.1% of the mass of the Solar System is in Jupiter. It's very big for a planet in our Solar System but it is very small compared to even the smallest stars.