Some interesting planetary tidbits

[renormalised]

Latest theory as to why Jupiter appears to have an anomalously small core for its size, especially when compared to the other giant planets....

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4722

Another Neptunian trojan asteroid discovered at the giant planet's L5 Lagrangian.

http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/mpec/K10/K10P50.html

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1189666

http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2010/08/12/index.html

[CraigS]

Cool stuff. Thanks, Carl.

Lots to read there !! Big(ish) Trojans lurking out there, too.

As a preliminary aside, the fantasy part of my brain wants to believe that Jupiter was meant to be the twin of the Sun (ie: 'twas meant to be a binary system .. but something stopped it in its tracks). All we need is for Saturn to collide with it, (to light 'er up), before our Sun eats Earth up, and humans to take residence on say, Enceladeus. Haven't done the calcs on any of this yet, mind you.
:)
Oh well, I'll leave that one at the door (given my stance on Science bring indifferent to beliefs) .. and get on with some more serious stuff.

Cheers & thanks for the interesting post.

[renormalised]

Needs a lot more mass than having Saturn take the plunge....needs approximately 80 times its mass before it can ignite any nuclear reactions in the core of the planet. If Jupiter had've started to form earlier on in the formation of the Sun....say as the protostellar cloud was still collapsing instead of after the Sun was pretty much complete and had an accretion disk, there may have been a chance it could've formed as a small star. Most likely an M dwarf if it snuffled up enough mass or a brown dwarf if it didn't.

[multiweb]

Bugger that!... Enough with the full moon! :P ;)

[renormalised]

The full moon would be much brighter than either of them, anyway:)

[CraigS]

Wiki says:
"Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 times as massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star, the smallest red dwarf is only about 30 percent larger in radius than Jupiter".
Could we turn it into a red dwarf ?
:)
PS: Be careful ... wouldn't want to destroy a good fantasy, here, huh ? Cheers

[renormalised]

Only if we had another 75-80 Jupiter's worth of material lying around:)