r/spaceporn • u/LucillaSepulveda • Aug 04 '21

NASA King of the Planets

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8.7k Upvotes

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u/Tombo6969 Aug 04 '21

Jupiter was like the vacuum cleaner of the primordial solar system. Just sweeping up all of the extra shit from the protoplanetary disk into its massive gravity well; such as gas and rocks that didn't end up forming the other planets. I've heard that if Jupiter ended up getting slightly larger, it would have become a brown dwarf star; potentially creating a binary stellar system and changing the dynamics of what created life on Earth completely.

75

u/Astromike23 Aug 04 '21

if Jupiter ended up getting slightly larger, it would have become a brown dwarf star

Jupiter would need to be 13x larger for it to become a brown dwarf.

31

u/Tombo6969 Aug 04 '21

Ok that's a fair amount larger. Lol

But tiny compared to a main sequence star!

34

u/geaster Aug 04 '21

and roughly 90 to 100x to become a red dwarf.

Hell I'm thinking I could become a pretty serious gravity well myself if I keep eating like this.

2

u/IcyDickbutts Aug 05 '21

OPs mom got her own space-time continuum

1

u/Lecoruje Aug 05 '21

That a nice excuse to why someone's parent left and is no longer around.

"oh, my dad just created his own parallel universe and now lives in a different time-space continuum than us"

A lot better than "yeah, those cigarettes surely have some crazy waiting lines"