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Yes, also being 10x the mass of Earth that far out hints that it may be an interstellar object captured by the Sun.
by 1970-01-01 2y ago
Yes, also being 10x the mass of Earth that far out hints that it may be an interstellar object captured by the Sun.
- nonethewiser 2y agoForgive my ignorance but how is that different than the rest of the planets?
- tliltocatl 2y agoThe rest of the planets are theorized to have condensed from the protoplanetary disk that formed the same molecular cloud the Sun did. I. e. they have formed at approximately same time as the sun and from same material, sans gravitational separation.
- swayvil 2y agoAh, so a captured body would be quite different and alien. Really old too. Like, first generation of stars.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoNot at all implied. It could be boring and younger too. 10x earth masses usually implies a gas giant.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- geuis 2y agoWould likely be older than the solar system itself. Probably not first gen star old, but likely would have formed before the sun did. Don't know how different it would be though. Would have formed out of maybe different ratios of elements than what was in the molecular cloud we formed from, but otherwise a large body like this would have undergone similar geological processes as our own planets.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- libraryofbabel 2y agoThe other planets formed from material in the same nebula (cloud of gas and dust) that collapsed to form the sun. The idea here is this planet would have been moving through the interstellar medium and just happened to pass close enough to the sun’s gravity well to get captured in a (very distant) orbit.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoCapture would be like a reverse gravitational slingshot? This planet happened to meet the sun at an angle where it lost enough energy to fall into orbit instead of slinging back out like those comets that come around on long cycles?
- tough 2y agogravitational capture
- marcosdumay 2y agoAFAIK, it could be in a 2 bodies slingshot, multi-body interaction with some other stuff on the Oort cloud, or tidal interaction (what could happen way more easily with a nebula).
- noah_buddy 2y agoA comet coming back on a long cycle is an orbit
- s1artibartfast 2y agoYou don't need to lose energy to enter orbit any more than you need to lose energy too roll a ball down a hill.
- tliltocatl 2y agoNot true. An obit is not an infinite "plain" with a finite "hill" on but rather a finite "valley". The ball will exit the valley on the other side unless it loses excess kinetic energy somewhere in the valley.
- water-data-dude 2y agoI wanted to get a sense of what that MEANS relative to the rest of the gas giants. Apparently it’d be roughly the size of Uranus or Neptune. I guess I’d always put all the gas giants in the same “very, unimaginably big” bucket. I knew Jupiter was the biggest, then Saturn, but I didn’t realize just HOW big they were compared to the rest. At the risk of stating the very, very obvious, Jupiter is huge!!! Masses of gas giants are: Jupiter, 317.8 earth mass; Saturn, 95.2 earth mass; Neptune, 17.1 earth mass; Uranus, 14.5 earth mass [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Unit_of_mass_in_astronomy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Unit_of_mass_in_a...
- mncharity 2y agoSo Earth-mass orders-of-magnitude go something like: [big] 3 Juno, [balls] Ceres, Io, Moon, Mars, Earth, [gas] Uranus-Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter and super-Jupiters, [fusion] brown dwarfs, stars... .
- jvm___ 2y agoThe Sun is 99.86% of the mass in our solar system. Jupiter is 0.1% and everything else fits in that last 0.04%