Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat is the fate of the largest planet in our solar system?
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Hi.
I'm David Ego from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
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Hey, Daniel, do you ever think about what the night sky looked like to our ancestors?
I do. I wonder how it looked at them. And I also like thinking even further back in the past, like what did the dinosaurs see in this guy?
Yeah, they probably should have looked at this guy more carefully, you know, looking for meteors for example.
I know dinosaur astronomers totally fell down on the job, but you can even think further back, like the first eyeballs on Earth five hundred million years ago, you mean.
Like microbe astronomers, or you know, I think to the future. I wonder what the night sky will look like to humans billions of years from me.
It could be totally different.
I mean, if there even are humans.
Then Yeah, Well, I'm thinking about the future cockroach astronomers and hoping they will keep an eye on the stars for.
Us so whatever they see doesn't bug them. I am more hamm and cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And that was the first time I ever said cockroach on the podcast.
And astronomers in the same sentence Publicly.
I love astronomers. I love astronomy. I'm nothing but pro astronomers. I do like the idea of dinosaur astronomers. That's pretty cool. My favorite story about dinosaur astronomers is that they really did have a chance to save themselves.
Your favorite I feel like you thought about this before.
Oh yeah, absolutely. You know that the meteor that came and wiped out the dinosaurs made a near pass by the Earth ten years earlier, no way, Yeah, and came close enough that they should have been able to look up and see it in the sky. So if they had funded their version of NASA, they could have saved their own.
Lives ten years. You think dinosaurs could have built spaceships.
And necessity is the mother of invention, right, do you think.
They should have called the dinosaur Bruce Willis, or put them on a spaceship and get him to deflect that asteroid in ten years.
Well, you know the other option is what happened, So anything is better than that.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge talk about dinosaur astronomers. That's all we do.
Daniel and Jorge digress in the very first moments of the podcast.
Yes, that's right. Now, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained the universe the production of iHeartRadio, in which.
We talk about all the amazing and beautiful and crazy things about the universe, the violent events, the incredible drama happening in the inside of stars, the tiny little particles that apparently make up everything you see and touch and taste.
Yeah, all of the spacey stuff out there, happening in the universe and even in our own backyards, or I guess our solar system backyard.
That's right, because when you look out into the night sky, you are not seeing a still picture. You are not seeing a flat image. You are seeing a drama unfolding on cosmic distance scales and time scales. If you were to look at the night sky sped up a little bit. You would see incredible events, huge explosions, massive collisions. It would put Hollywood to shame.
It's like a cosmological telenovella, a lot of twist and turns.
I don't know if anybody's really like backstabbing anybody, or.
Does the Earth have an evil twin on the other side of the Sun Planet x dum extreme close up.
I don't know if there's so much political intrigue, but there is definitely drama. There are things that happen rapidly all of a sudden, There are sudden changes of fate. There are things that are happening, and so I think it's fun to think about how our solar system will evolve.
Yeah, because as we as humans find out about one hundred years ago, the universe is not static. Things are changing. The stars are moving, the galaxies are blazing across the universe, and new stars are being born all the time.
That's right, and stars can change right there, formed from the collapse of gases into a hot, dense object that confuse. Eventually they turn into something else, like a black hole or a white dwarf. They go through this evolution, and so it's natural to also wonder, like, what about planets? Do planets have future stages in their evolution? Are they like Pokemon? They can evolve into different versions.
The same that Earth is only stage one.
I don't know enough about Pokemon to even really make that joke. I just watch my kids play, so I can say energy cards and pokemons evolve. Then we're at the end of my knowledge.
I think our planet is Earth type.
Is it an EX or a GX? Does it have the shiny glint on.
It it used to? I think it needs to go a shiny flint too.
That's right. And we did a podcast recently in which we talked about Jupiter and how close Jupiter was to having become a star, and a bunch of listeners wrote in asking us about that. Jim Sanchez, Doug Dodds, and Ryan Kirkas all wrote and asked us, like, well, is Jupiter on the verge of becoming a star? Could it one day eventually become a star?
Because I guess it's kind of a fine line between being a giant cloud of dust and being a giant gas planet and maybe being a giant ball of flaming gas like the Sun. It's kind of a fine line it turns.
Out, how final line is it either on fire or you're not. That seems pretty clear cut to me.
Well, I mean, what does it take, like a match or you know, a spark. I guess that's the question we'll be talking about today.
That's right.
So to the other program, we'll be asking the question could Jupiter become a star? Is it too late for Jupiter or can it still you know, find the right role and suddenly be the new darling of Hollywood.
Hey, you know, jump onto TikTok and anybody can become a star.
Oh, hey, that's what Jupiter needs.
That's right. But there was some actual serious talk about this. A couple of decades ago. NASA sent a probe out to study Jupiter, and they didn't want the probe to infect any of Jupiter's moons where we think there might potentially be life, right, microbia life. And we didn't want to crash Galileo this probe onto any of Jupiter's moons because we didn't want to bring any earth microbes. Right, once you bring Earth's microbes, you can no longer ask like, are there native microbes? And so instead they crashed the probe into Jupiter itself.
Oh, because we don't care about infect.
For Jupiter, I think the idea was that it would burn up and get crushed because Jupiter has this incredible atmosphere so get immolated in descent, whereas the moons don't have those atmospheres, and so it would actually land on the surface and potentially survive.
But there was some concern about that.
Yeah, people were wondering, like, if Jupiter is on the verge of becoming a star, if it's this huge ball of gas and you drop a match into it, essentially, is there a possibility that it could have ignited the atmosphere or Jupiter and birth a new.
Star, Because I mean Jupiter, if you think about it, it's a giant ball of hydrogen, right, kind of like the Hindenberg.
Kind of like the Hindenburg, but much bigger.
That's what I mean. It's like a big balloon made out of hydrogen and all you need is a little flame and some oxygen.
All of a sudden, it sounds very unstable.
Right, does it sounds like a nineteen twenties idea?
Yeah? And you know this actually appears in science fiction as well, in the well known series two thousand and one twenty ten, et cetera. They turn Jupiter into a star. Oh on purpose, Yeah, on purpose, I guess. You know, the aliens. We don't really ever understand their psychology, but they turn it into a new star. They call it Lucifer.
Nice, the aliens call it Lucifer.
I don't remember the details that book. Who calls it Lucifer, whether it's the aliens naming it or you know, earthbound cartoonists who are elected to a naming committee who gave it that name.
But I do remember the sequel to two thousand and one, two thousand and ten. I think that at the end, Jupiter does become a star sorry spoiler, becomes a star at the end of that movie. And I always wondered, like, oh, that's pretty interesting, But what does that mean? Is that going to change our solar system or what's the big deal?
Yeah? Exactly. So it's an interesting question. It's right here in our backyard. It seems relevant. So we thought we would try to figure out how close is Jupiter to becoming a star? If you wanted to turn it into a star, what would you have to do?
So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet and ask people to submit their answer to the question could Jupiter become a star?
That's right, So thank you to everybody who participated, And if you'd like to participate in future rounds of person on the Internet interviews, please send us a note to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We'd love for you to answer our questions.
And before you listen to these answers, think about it for a second. Do you think Jupiter could become a star. Here's what be glad to say.
I think anyone who claims to know whether Jupiter can turn into a start absolutely is probably exaggerating their knowledge in order to make up for deficiencies.
I think Jupiter is like a failed star because it's not massive enough to have the fusion reactions at the core. The only way I can think of that it could become a star would be if it pulled in enough matter.
Well it isn't for our reason, I suppose not enough mass. I think you almost became a star. Well, well maybe if are a lot of planets struck it.
I think the universe is very unlikely to happen, But it happened, so perhaps it's just it does unlikely that Jupiter would turn into a star.
But I suppose it could happen.
Yeah, what kind of star. Jupiter is a gas giant and it's made of gas, and stars are also made of gas.
So I think maybe if a smallest star came into.
It, I suppose if it became big enough and had enough gravity, it could turn on and become a star. But I'm not aware that it's growing.
My short answer is, I don't think so.
Yes, I think that it's eight times more massive that it would need to become in order for Jupiter to start burning hydrogen and fusing it into helium. But even if you were to combine all the planets in the Solar System, you wouldn't get to the mass needed. So by natural means, no, it's not possible. But theoretically could Jupiter become a star then yes, you just need to add eat more jupiters to it.
If Jupiter's ap does extremely well, I think Jupiter might be able to become a star.
Oh my gosh.
I believe that the gas giants have cleaned up our Solar system enough that it is unlikely that Jupiter would be able to get enough mass to turn into a star. Well, theoretically, possible, it's unlikely. I think the way that it might happen is maybe if there are a rogue planet that collided with Jupiter or sufficient other material like comets and asteroids and so on. But that seems implossible.
All right. Some great answers I like the one that said yes, I mean, no, wait, what's the star?
If you're not going to be accurate, you should at least be well.
I guess that perfectly reflects I feel. I'm like, yes, no, wait, let's the finest star.
Yeah.
I think it is an interesting question because you know, different stuff out there have evolutions, you know, we see stuff changing in the universe, and we haven't ever talked about the question of like is a planet stable? Could a planet just hang out forever or does it have a next natural stage in its evolution?
Mmmm?
Yeah? Is this possible that we suddenly have two stars in our sky? You know, kind of like star wars?
Yeah? Yeah? And what would that mean for when you have to go to work?
It would probably make our days longer.
Yeah, it would make our days longer and much more irregular. Right, you wouldn't have regular patterns you have times when both stars were in the sky and times when only one of them was in the sky. Have you ever read the three body problem? You know that the calendar on that planet is very complicated.
All right, let's jump into it, Daniel. What makes something a star versus a planet? I guess let's start with that question. What happens at that fourth in the road for a big ball of gas where it it turns into a Jupiter, or it turns into a star, and or can it can it switch over?
Yeah? So really it's all about matt Like, if you are a big enough blob of stuff, then gravity will pull you in and compress you hard enough that you will start to fuse. You'll create the conditions necessary to squish these particles together so that they fuse, which releases a huge amount of energy. And that's really the distinction between a planet and a star. A star is fusing, it's releasing energy, it's burning itself, and a planet is much more inert than no fusion happening at the center of the Earth or at the center of Jupiter, for example.
And that's just because we don't have enough stuff. Like if we had more stuff, it would be heavier and things would get more compressive. You sort of get to that pressure where fusion happens.
That's right. It's all about the stuff, and it depends on which kind of stuff. Like if you're just hydrogen, just gas, then you need less stuff than if you are like a huge ball of oxygen or carbon, because the heavier elements take higher pressure or higher temperature conditions in order to fuse. So hydrogen is the easiest. So if you're going to go all hydrogen, you need a big ball of gas. If you're gonna go all carbon or all oxygen or something heavier, you need a bigger bone. But in principle, if you took the Earth and made it much more massive, same stuff, same mixture of stuff, it would turn into a star.
Wow, how much more stuff? I guess? I guess The question is what does it take to be a star? How much stuff do you need?
We can think about it in terms of like pounds or kilograms or squirrels, but those units are hard to grasp because the numbers are so big.
Let's just talk about it in terms of stuff.
So let's talk about it in terms of units of like one son. So the minimum amount of stuff you need to reach any sort of fusion is about one to one hundredth of the mass of the Sun, of our sun, of our sun. Yeah, we're using our sun here as a unit.
You could have something one hundredth of our Sun and it could be a star.
That's right, And that's only like really special. That's the absolute minimum. It gets you above the shelf for the lowest, weakest, lamest kind of fusion. And if you reach that threshold, you're called a brown dwarf. And it's a special kind of fusion. It's not just hydrogen fusion. It's deuterium fusion. And deuterium, if you remember, is an isotope of hydrogen, and the nucleus you have a proton and a neutron, not just a proton, and that neutron is crucial because it helps sort of bring those protons together and stick them together.
I see that sounds small, like one hundreds the size of the Sun, but that's it like what like ten thousand earth.
That's yes, something like ten thousand earths. It's a lot bigger than the Earth, and so it's not that small, right, I mean, it's small compared to our Sun, but it's a big object. And they're called brown dwarfs, but they're pretty badly named because they're not actually brown.
They're not hydrolely dwarves if they're ten thousand earths. Also, so two strikes there for the physics community.
In one name, they're dwarfs compared to the other stars. But they don't look at all brown. Okay, they look magenta or like orange red, and that's just because the kind of fusion that happens and the kind of light that they emit icee.
But there are still sort of big balls of fiery stuff. Yeah, they're just don't glow brightly and they're kind of tinged in a certain color.
And these things exist, and they're not that rare in the universe. There's one like six and a half light years away from us. It's called Luman sixteen. And so they're not that easy to see because they're not that bright. But you know, theoretically we understand that they should exist and we see them out there, and so this is totally a possibility. It's the minimum threshold to become a star.
And then those are the smallest stars. So then what's the next step up?
Next step up is you know, really you might call the first kind of real star, and this is a red dwarf. A brown dwarf, people argue, like, you know, is it a big, hot burning planet. Is a star that's a you know, kind of lame But a red dwarf nobody argues about, like, it's definitely a star. It burns hydrogen. Like essentially, this is the minimum star you need if you just star from hydrogen. If you have one tenth the mass of the Sun and a huge ball of hydrogen gas, gravity will pull it together and squeeze it hard enough for it to fuse fuse.
But in a brown star, there's no few.
There is fusion, but it's deuterium fusion. It's not hydrogen fusion. A brown star is not hot enough to fuse hydrogen. You need that extra neutron in the nucleus to make the fusion happen, and so the fusion doesn't release as much energy either.
Oh I see.
So it's sort of like a cooler, weaker, lamer kind of fusion, but.
It's still fusion. It's just kind of an easier fusion.
It's easier and it's not as dramatic. It doesn't produce as much energy. So that's why the brown dwarfs aren't so luminous.
Icy.
All right, So then when you get to one tenth of the mass of the Sun, then you get the real cooking going.
That's right, that's a legit star. It's a red dwarf. And you know there's one that's only six hundred light years away. It has a name that's all like letters and acronyms, so it's totally unpronounceable. But the cool thing about it is that it's really dense, like it has one tenth the mass of the Sun, but it's radius it's the same as Saturn.
Wow, so it's tiny.
Yeah, but it's it's compact. It's a little dwarf. It's a little red dwarf. It's perfectly named.
And is it red? Is it red?
So there you go, two check marks for the astronomy community.
You're up to zero. Then zero zero zero physicists, this is zero public.
But you know, something the size of a planet can definitely be a star. That's not an issue. It's not just about size, it's about mass. I remember, gravity will gather this stuff together and make it really dense for density.
Yeah, all right, well it's clear that things about the size of planets can become stars. And so now let's talk about Jupiter and whether Jupiter could or could have become a star. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're talking about making a star in our own backyard. So what do we need to grill? Some matches?
A lot of flour which is on short supply.
Oh no, better order a create of it. All right, So let's we're talking about whether Jupiter could be one day become a star, which is a crazy idea, but you're telling me that it's all about the stuff. You have enough stuff and you're compress it enough, then almost anything can become a star. Yeah, And so let's talk about Jupiter. How massive is Jupiter?
Jupiter has about one tenth of one percent of the mass of the Sun, so one one thousandth of the Sun.
Okay, So it's it's ten times too small to be a brown dwarf.
Yeah, the threshold is one hundredth of the Sun for a brown dwarf, one tenth of the Sun for a red dwarf. And so Jupiter it's ten times too small to be a brown dwarf and one hundred times too small to be a red dwarf.
Okay.
And it's made out of roughly the right stuff. It's mostly hydrogen. It's just not a big enough.
Spoonful, I see. And you need that stuff because I mean, while you like, the Earth could become a star if you compress it down enough, but there's nothing really compressing the Earth that much except for its gravity, and so without that stuff to create the gravity, you can't turn into a star.
Yeah, the Earth is like one three hundred thousands the size of the Sun, and so we're nowhere near massive enough to ever become a star. Jupiter is like it's in within shouting distance, you know, like ten times too small to be a pathetic little brown dwarf is like it's you know, ten times is not a small thing to overcome.
But it's still ten times too small. Like that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
No, And Jupiter has already really big, right, So essentially, in order for Jupiter to become a star, you have to multiply its mass by a factor of ten. That means like, gather nine more jubiters somewhere somehow and add it to Jupiter.
All right, Well, it doesn't sound very likely then that Jupiter is going to turn into star. Why was NASA worried about it twenty thirty years ago?
You know, I think they just thought that crashing a probe into it could spark a reaction. You know, the process we're talking about a sort of a natural gathering due to gravity. You know, the Hindenburg went into flames without being the mass of the Sun, and so people were just worried that adding a spark to a ball of gas could potentially ignite it. But I think that was a small community of paranoid voices inside NASA, and most people weren't too worried. But you know, if you know the story, we were worried about igniting the atmosphere when we tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico.
Oh really, Yeah, that was a possible concern.
Yeah, before they tested it, they did the calculations and they couldn't rule out igniting the atmosphere. But you know, they went ahead and tried it.
Anyway, what's the worst that can happen?
So it's not just particle physicists that are potentially ending the world.
Okay, oh good, it's other kinds of physicists.
That's right, and even ending potentially other worlds. Yeah. So if you wanted to turn Jupiter into a star, you'd have to somehow gather these materials.
Yeah, let's talk about that. If you're an alien in the Arthur's cy Clark novel, how would you do it?
Well, you know, where can you get these materials? Like, what is the source of raw materials you'd need to turn Jupiter into a star. There's really the biggest things in the Solar System are the Sun in Jupiter and after that everything else is a tiny detail. So the only place to get this stuff is from the Sun. So you have to basically steal from the Sun, siphon off a huge amount of matter, and you know, feed that into Jupiter somehow.
Really, there's not enough gas floating around or asteroids floating around to kind of feed Jupiter.
There's only a tiny little bit of gas and asteroids. Most of the stuff is coalesced into the Sun and into Jupiter. And you know, even Jus like a tiny fracture. Remember it's one to one thousands of the mass of the Sun. So if you like made a bar chart of all the stuff in the Solar system, it would basically just be the Sun and then you know a few crumbs. So Jupiter is just like the biggest crumb, and after that there's basically nothing of note.
All right, So you would need Jupiter to be ten times bigger, and so maybe let's talk about how that would look like, Like, let's say we increase the mass of Jupiter by two how would it look different.
It wouldn't have enough energy to fuse, right, and so it just look like a bigger Jupiter. It just you know, be bigger and fatter, and it would have just as many crazy storms, but it'd be really no fundamental change. It might emit more radiation because it would have more activity in the interior, do the increased pressure.
Like the surface would look sort of the same, would just be bigger.
It would just be bigger. Yeah, and the surface would look sort of the same. But we don't really understand Jupiter's like cloud patterns and what's going on there, the crazy vortices, the red spot. That's the kind of thing we don't understand. And if we increase Jupiter's mass, then all the features that contribute to that craziness would be doubled, and so we'd probably get it, as you know, twice as many bands and much more craziness, and maybe the red spot would be even more insane. Right, But there are lots of questions about these gas giants. Remember Saturn has a hexagon on this north pole that we don't understand either. Right.
We did a whole podcast about that mystery.
It'd be a fascinating experiment to do to double the mass of Jupiter and just see what happens, Like, hey, turn that knob and see how crazy these planets get.
Yeah, let's do it, Daniel.
Okay, I'll ride a proposal.
What's the worst that can happen? Well, what would be happening on the inside, Like I know that the inside of Jupiter there's like what is it frozen hydrogen or something? Metallic hydrogen.
This metallic hydrogen. Yeah, the oceans of liquid hydrogen is all these layers of more and more compressed hydrogen, And as you add more stuff to it, then those layers get denser and denser, right until at the very core that's where the fusion would begin. When you get enough mass, you sort of like gradually approach it and you get these layers and layers of more intensely squeezed hydrogen.
Okay, So then as I increase demand, Let's say I'm pouring more hydrogen into Jupiter. Now we're at like four times the size of Jupiter right now or the mass? Do things still change? Like, you know, does it suddenly become more solid at the core or does it become like a this kind of nebulous ball of gas or does it Would it look the same just bigger.
It would look the same, just bigger. I don't know that you would see much different from the outside. Like again, we don't understand the patterns on the surface, so it's hard to predict what those would look like. But on the inside, you be getting new layers. You'd beginning the core would be denser. Right as you add more mass, you're creating new layers in the core that are denser and hotter, and eventually you're going to make the one that's going to fuse.
Oh, I wonder if it would grow another eye. Wouldn't that be cool?
That would be totally awesome. In fact, we'd wonder if that happened, if it was typical or unusual. So really, we should replicate this project. We should make like ten you know, double jupiters or ten quad jupiters, just to see if it's a systematic or not.
Wow.
I mean, while we're scooping matter out of the sun and playing god, let's be systematic about it.
It's that fun with it, all right. So now let's say I keep going and I'm now I've pumped up Jupiter up to one one hundredth the size of the mass of the Sun, where it could become a brown dwarf. I guess would it just automatically turn into a brown dwarf or does it need like some kind of event to trigger it, or does it happen slowly?
Jupiter wouldn't actually turn into a brown dwarf if you got it to one one hundred the mass of the Sun, because that's a special kind of process. It needs deuterium. And if we're just adding hydrogen, remember which just protons and electrons, that needs to get to one tenth the mass of the sun. Deutyrium is a special thing, and you need a proton and a neutron and the electron around it, and the neutron helps that fusion happen. You might think like, well, that's weird. Hows a neutron help fusion happen? It's neutral anyway, right. Remember, neutrons are these bound objects of quarks that have the strong force. The neutron is what helps hold things together, like in heavier elements. The neutron is the reason why the element is stable. It keeps the proton separated, and the little residual strong force from the quarks helps tie everything together. So the neutrons are like the little helper assistant particles making the fusion happen. So brown dwarfs use this special channel only available when you have deterium. I see, so Jupiter isn't mostly deterium, it's mostly hydrogen.
Oh man, all right, So I did all this work. I inflated Jupiter to ten times in size, and apparently nothing happens.
Yeah, exactly, So let's keep going.
I just keep pressing the accelerator and see what happens to Jupiter. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
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All right, Daniel, If I pump up Jupiter to one one hundreds of the size of the Sun, or the mass of the Sun, nothing would happen. I would need to get to one tenth of the mass of the Sun in order for Jupiter to be star.
That's right, Make a blob of gas that's one tenth the mass of the Sun. Then gravity will coalesce it and it will start to fuse, and it will start to glow and it will be a new star and you can name it whatever you like.
Well, now I feel all this pressure to come up with the grid name. But basically you need one hundred jupiters. You need Jebert to be one hundred times bigger or more massive in order for it to ever become a star. And even then it would be a red dwarf, which is not like the shiniest, prettiest kind of star.
That's right, It'd be much smaller than our star and not as bright.
And would it ignite right away or is this like a slow burned where it slowly turns into a red dwarf?
Well, it depends on how dense it is when you start, Like if you just start from a big diffuse cloud of gas, the way our Solar system started, then it's going to take a long time for gravity to pull that together. If you start from a place where it's already pretty dense, like about as dense as Jupiter, then it's not going to take gravity that long because everything is already pretty close together. But it will start to burn from the in side, right, and then that we'll have to heat it the next layers and the next layers and the next layers. And so this isn't the kind of thing that's going to happen, you know, in five seconds, but it's also not going to take a million years.
Oh I see, it's kind of started the inside and then it's the heat the explosion of that. It's going to gradually make it to the surface and then that's when you'll see a glow.
Yeah, it's star exactly. And it's just like any other kind of fire, you know, the energy put out by it sustains it keeps that temperature hot, keeps those fusion processes going.
M all right, well it sounds like we're not likely to get one hundred jupiters all in the same spot suddenly. Although it's kind of cool to think about, and so maybe step us through what is the future of Jupiter. What's going to happen to it? It's not going to become a star, but what is it going to become?
Yeah, and you know, even if Jupiter did become a star, like if it turned on, I just want to mention that it's not going to be as bright as our sun, and it's much further from us. A right, Jupiter is much further from us than the Sun is, so even if it became a star, it wouldn't be nearly as bright in our sky as the Sun. It wouldn't even be as bright in the sky as the Moon is. Actually, one of our sharp listeners did this calculation, Dimitri Rudoi, found that a red dwarf would be a bit brighter than the Moon in our sky. Thanks for keeping us honest, Dmitri. So it would just be like a fairly bright star in the sky.
Oh really, yeah, even as is without inflating it Jupiter. If suddenly Jupiter ignited became a star, which we said it couldn't happen.
But even if you turn Jupiter into a red dwarf, if you made it one hundred times as big and it ignited and it was a red dwarf, it wouldn't be as bright as our sun. And it's much further away from us, so it would appear dimmer in our sky, so it wouldn't be very bright.
Oh, the distance from us to the Sun is much closer than us to Jupiter.
Yeah. Wow, Jupiter is six times as far away from the Sun as we are, which means that at its closest approach, it's like four times as far away from Earth as the Sun is. And so that makes it one sixteenth is bright if it was the same brightness as the Sun, but it's going to be, you know, much smaller than the Sun at the minimum threshold, and so maybe just not that bright in the sky compared to the Sun or even the Moon.
So pretty much nothing would change if Jupiter suddenly became a star.
Yeah, it wouldn't really change at all. I mean, it wouldn't be as bright as elon Musk's Starlink satellites.
Even we wouldn't get that dramatic two suns floating in the sky Luke Skywalker looking out into the sundown of two stars. It would just be like a bright star in the sky.
Yeah. And so for that to happen, to have like two effective suns in your sky, you really need a second star that's as big, as bright and as close.
That's really critical, and that that would probably be kind of a mess, wouldn't it. Like if you had two suns that close together to each other and to you, it wouldn't be a happy, happy solar system.
Yeah, and if so, how created that sun and then inserted into our existing solar system. There's no way that any of our orbits would be stable, right, It would like completely gravitationally perturb all the orbits. Like say, for example, a huge sun came and ate Jupiter, like some sun from another solar system happened to intersect our solar system and just gobbled up Jupiter, and then we call that the new Jupiter for some reason, that would totally destroy our solar system. Like Earth would get flung out into interstellar space. There's almost no chance that all the planets would then like suddenly fall into a new stable set of orbits around this pair of suns.
Like that's very totally disrupt our orbits and probably tosses out into space.
Yeah. Yeah, we'd become a rogue planet. We'd ended with no stars.
All right, Well, so then what is more likely to happen to Jupiter. What is Jupiter's most likely ist future?
Jupiter's future is actually not that exciting. I mean, planets are pretty stable. They're just hunks of stuff that are mostly inert. I mean, the stuff going on in the center of the Earth but it's not burnt itself, it's not consuming itself. So like stars have a lifespan because they're burning their fuel and eventually they can't manage that anymore and they collapse. Right the fire from the fusion is sustaining them. But we're not really burning anything here on Earth, and Jupiter isn't burning anything. It's just a lump of stuff in space. And they can do that basically forever lump of gas. Yeah.
Yeah, like if you just have a blob of gas, it can just be a blob of gas forever.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, the Earth has an uncertain future because we're so close to the Sun that when the Sun evolves and becomes a red giant, it's going to become much much larger. In the end stages of its life, it's going to grow and eventually the Earth will be inside the Sun. Like the Sun will grow so large that where we are currently will be inside the radius of the Sun.
But for Jupiter.
But Jupiter it's much further away.
It's got a good spot, so they're not going to be consumed by the Sun or maybe even affected by it.
Yeah, when the Sun goes red giant and absorbs the Earth. Jupiter will be fine out there. I mean, the radiation from the Sun will increase. The heat from the Sun will increase, and so that will increase the amount of solar radiation that lands on Jupiter. So it might get more violent storms on its surface. It might effect that red spot, might heat it up a little bit, but it's not going to be a big change for Jupiter. So Jupiter is in a pretty good spot. It's happy to sit there forever and not really do anything.
Sounds like we're going to have to move to Jupiter in a few billion years.
I wouldn't recommend it. Jupiter is not that great a place to land, as the Galileo probe discovered.
But maybe one of the moons of Jupiter, right, they're saying we could potentially live in one of them. There's water maybe in some of them.
Yeah, there's lots of moons of Jupiter that we think might already have life. We did some fun podcast episodes about what's happening in the potential underground oceans on some of those frozen moons. Some of them have like a thick layer of ice with water underneath, and so that could be a nice place to live absolutely.
Yeah, there's a big ball of ice and water out there just waiting for us.
Yeah, assuming the aliens don't come and turn Jupiter into a star.
But they can't. They would have to grow it by one hundred.
They would have to grow it by one hundred, yeah, exactly, So they have to steal all that mass from our Sun. So I don't know what the aliens were thinking in twenty ten.
Well, I wonder if the future Jupiter juvial and astronomers are then going to be laughing at our astronomers, just like we were just laughing at the dinosaur astronomers saying, man, they should have seen the Sun. They should have known that the Sun was going to turn through red giant and gone out of the way.
Yeah, well that's going to be in like a billion years, And so I hope that we're still doing astronomy in a billion years, and then we have those kind of things to think about and to worry about. But I also hope that in a billion years we've gotten off the planet and we have our Jovian moon colonies and astronomy happening in the outer reaches of the Solar System, and maybe even develop warp drives to go do other solar systems. Hey, I guess that's one way you could do it. You could build a wormhole that connects Jupiter in the Sun to sort of shunt material from the Sun directly into Jupiter.
There you go. Oh no, now, now we sparked the imagination of a physicist. What's the worst that can happen if we create a wormhole recognized Jupiter and the Sun?
Yeah, exactly. Well, Fortunately I don't know any engineers willing to actually build this thing for me, so I'm free to speculate wildly.
Oh good, Yeah, yeah, well we'll all make a pack. All of us engineers will make a pack. Not to help any physicists do any kind of crazy stuff.
Don't answer emails from Daniel, even if it seemed like a good idea.
Yeah, even if he has money, don't hit reply. All right, Well, it sounds like a lot of the people who maybe were worried that Jupiter was going to turn into a star it can rest easy because it doesn't sound like Jupiter is going to be a star anytime soon, or can even become a star anytime soon, or maybe ever.
That's right, even though Jupiter totally dwarfs us. It's really small compared to the thresholds necessary to become even the dimmest, lamest kind of star. And it's much much smaller than those cosmic giants that are out there fusing and illuminating the cosmos. And so while there is a lot of drama out there in the universe, stars collapsing and forming and all sorts of crazy things happening, it seems like Jupiter it's pretty solid.
So rest easy and relaxed, because Jupiter is just gonna keep on floating out there, keeping its big red eye on us.
That's right, and we recommend you invest in Jovian moon real estate.
Can you is that? Listen on redfin.
Send me a check and I will send you a title to your new property.
It sounds like you could get arrested for that, Daniel, but all right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us.
And thanks for sending in your questions. If you'd like a question answered on the podcast, please send it to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
See you next time.
Thanks for listening. Remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life. Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible. As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids Bible Storys podcast. Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen. With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents. Listen to Kids Bible Stoice Podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
