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Is Saturn a failed gas giant?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rob74 3y agoTIL that Uranus and Neptune fall into a different category than Jupiter and Saturn (ice giants vs. gas giants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_planet).
- x86x87 3y agoI learned about the term Jovian from "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" The idea of somehow capturing ice giants and bringin them into the zone where they would melt to create water in the planets closer to the star is a stelar system is fascinating. Also: the solar system would look completely different if Jupiter was not a thing.
- deprecative 3y agoThe fun thing is that Jupiter was migrating into the inner solar system and Saturn managed to convince it that it would be a bad time so they migrated back out. It's fascinating. I didn't realize the term ice giant was so unknown. It's a sample of one thread but I'd bet that if I asked a lot of my friends and family they wouldn't know it either.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoSaturn paid attention to mortgage rates while Jupiter was just going to buy whatever the missus wanted to keep her happy.
- toss1 3y agoSounds like a great thing — until the orbits of the rest of the planets destabilize and Earth gets ejected from the solar system. 'Tho if we have the technology and energy to move gas giants into different orbits, we probably have the capacity to actively keep Earth in a proper orbit (and imparting that much energy into the crust might make some interesting phenomena)
- x86x87 3y agoThe context was for terraforming other systems. One would hope we would not pull this stunt back home. Apparently jovians are a thing and it is considered (at least in scifi - haha) as an option. +1 on we would need to have the tech to do it.
- c_crank 3y agoEven if you somehow managed to move a gas giant around, what would you do with it once you relocated it? It's a big well of gravity leading to a hot, fast death with nothing to stand on.
- SoftTalker 3y agoFloating cities should be possible given the density of the atmosphere. Not sure Jupiter's atmosphere is stable enough though. Might be like living on a raft in a hurricane.
- c_crank 3y agoThat the atmosphere is mostly hydrogen doesn't make for easy ballooning. There isn't really a gas much lighter to provide lift. It also begs the question of 'why'. Everywhere you look, there is only wind, and no minerals to repair things with.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoA giant platform, with tubes hanging down to mine hydrogen and be a space gas station, partly fusioning it for energy and thrust to propel and keep it up, something like that?
- c_crank 3y agoAny of the gas they 'mined' (ignoring the immense difficulties of trying to mine liquid hydrogen) would be stuck on the platform without a rocket to carry it out of orbit. It would be much, much easier to stick a base on Ganymede or something and convert some of the ice there into fuel.
- jvm___ 3y agoThe Sun is 99.9% of the mass in our solar system. Jupiter is most of the remaining 0.1% and then the rest of the planets are included in the 0.01%. Also, Jupiter is the only planet that orbits around a point outside of the surface of the Sun. All the other planets point of orbit are below the surface of the Sun. Jupiter is massive.
- margalabargala 3y ago> Also, Jupiter is the only planet that orbits around a point outside of the surface of the Sun. Put differently, Jupiter and the Sun orbit one another.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoThere's a lightbulb & Princeton grad joke in there somewhere.
- klank 3y agoEvery two body orbit involves a barycenter that is not exactly in the center of either body (i.e. every planet/sun combo "orbit around one another"). The unique aspect of Jupiter is that the Jupiter/Sun barycenter is outside of the surface of the Sun. This requires an incredible amount of mass in Jupiter.
- kibwen 3y agoFor the same reason that we demoted Pluto to dwarf-planet status, I'm fully prepared to elevate Jupiter to super-planet status for this fact alone.
- undersuit 3y agoWhat if we demote the sun? It is in a class of stars that is too small to have a internal barycenter for all it's planets, there are larger stars that do because planets like Jupiter have a limit before they start being classed as Brown Dwarfs.
- c_crank 3y agoOne thing I'm pretty confident humanity will never do is move planets around like marbles. The masses involved make the suggestion laughable.
- arbuge 3y agoIt's a pretty dangerous game to play in any case. One slight deviation in a planet's orbit can throw an entire solar system out of balance over not-so-long time periods. Before you know it, your lush green planet is hurtling out alone into interstellar space, dooming your civilization to a quick death on an icy rogue world.
- afavour 3y agoThere’s a British space comedy called Red Dwarf that has surprisingly good novelisations by the original show writers. One novel has a sequence where they play pool with planets, obviously completely unrealistic but it’s a really fun sequence. There’s also another separate sequence describing how humans abandon Earth and use it as a giant landfill, resulting in a massive methane explosion that shoots Earth out of the solar system and into frozen deep space. All very silly but very imaginative.
- taude 3y agoLarry Niven's "A World Out of Time" had this as a plot device, when he wrote it in the 70s. I enjoyed the book a lot, a lot of hard-sci-fi readers did not.
- wruza 3y agoFor that energy budget it’s probably easier to bring your own phobos-sized body and pepper it with minerals mined nearby.
- scns 3y agoEarth would look different too. Through its' high mass, Jupiter gets the most visits by asteroids. He protects us. The romans named their highest god Jupiter.
- tivert 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_giant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_giant: > However, in the 1990s, it became known that Uranus and Neptune are really a distinct class of giant planets, being composed mainly of heavier volatile substances (which are referred to as "ices"). For this reason, Uranus and Neptune are now often classified in the separate category of ice giants.[2] I guess there's a distinction I wasn't aware of. Edit: I had this comment written, but I guess I waited too long to submit.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoIt's all about finding ice XI.
- jylam 3y ago> heavier volatile substances (which are referred to as "ices") When you know that astronomers call about anything that is not hydrogen or helium "metals" and you learn that even gazes are "ices" for some reason¸ makes you think now would be a good time to level the playground and start again :)
- BirAdam 3y agoI agree, but from what I understand it's partially about things typically behave. At super cool temperatures, ice acts like stone, and a bunch of other stuff will appear to be as strong as metals. There's also a ton of tradition dating back to the renaissance time period.
- giantrobot 3y agoRocks are basically silicon ice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- denton-scratch 3y agoThe abstract (all I read) doesn't explain why Saturn is a failed gas giant. I thought it was considered simply a gas giant?
- user6723 3y agoSaturn still emits more heat than it receives from the present sun.
- overnight5349 3y agoAs opposed to its previous star?
- user6723 3y agoOld Hebrew word for sun is Shamash. Tablets of Shamash give a hint.
- rbanffy 3y agoSeems pretty giant to me.
- p1mrx 3y agoYeah, that's pretty rich coming from researchers who are 25 orders of magnitude smaller.
- p1mrx 3y agoDon't worry about those haters with papers. You haven't failed. Just keep on being Saturn.
- drbojingle 3y agoAre we cancelling Saturn now?