View Single Post
  #6  
Old 25-08-2010, 07:55 PM
CraigS's Avatar
CraigS
Unpredictable

CraigS is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Australia
Posts: 3,023
Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised View Post
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.
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
Reply With Quote