2 ms·
Jupiter is orders of magnitude too small to be a brown dwarf. The "brown" implies IR radiation generated by gravitic collapse. If Jupiter was massive enough to
by bregma 6y ago
Jupiter is orders of magnitude too small to be a brown dwarf. The "brown" implies IR radiation generated by gravitic collapse. If Jupiter was massive enough to generate its own radiance it's unlikely Earth would be around to observe it.
The simplistic solar systems and textbooks in grade school are not just misleading when it comes to scale, but they're really really misleading. Few people really comprehend the scale of things in the universe.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoScale isn't the right thing to complain about here. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf : > most brown dwarfs are slightly smaller than Jupiter (15–20%) > Brown dwarfs are all roughly the same radius as Jupiter. The suggestion that Jupiter is "orders of magnitude too small" to be a brown dwarf is obviously wrong in terms of size, but it's also wrong in terms of mass: > at the low end of the range (10 [Jupiter masses]), their volume is governed primarily by Coulomb pressure