Is Jupiter Dissolving Its Rocky Core? 181
sciencehabit writes "Jupiter is the victim of its own success. Sophisticated new calculations indicate that our solar system's largest planet, which weighs more than twice as much as all of the others put together, has destroyed part of its central core. The culprit is the very hydrogen and helium that made Jupiter a gas giant, when the core's gravity attracted these elements as the planet formed. The finding suggests that the most massive extrasolar planets have no cores at all."
Weight? (Score:2, Insightful)
"which weighs more than twice as much as all of the others put together"
I wonder if this guess is still correct. I would assume this weight was appropriated by assuming the planet had a solid core?
Re:Ho Hum (Score:5, Insightful)
Alas our current US government has sought to sink our space program so it will need to wait for another day.
You mean when they cancelled shuttle-derived boondoggle money pits?
That's actually the best way to *increase* the resources available to do real the planetary science you're talking about.
did it ever have a core? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I know, that question was still open to at least some debate. It's hypothesized that there should be a solid core based on the mineral composition and some simulations, but I don't believe there's any direct evidence of it, at least until the mission (mentioned in the article) to measure its gravitational field with an orbiting probe reaches it.
Re:Weight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ho Hum (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see the shuttle no longer leeching the life out of NASA, but you have to know the cuts go well beyond that. It's not like ditching the shuttle actually freed up more funds for NASA. Bankers need their bonuses far more than we need to do basic science, after all.
Re:Ho Hum (Score:5, Insightful)
Then how does Venus, which has almost no magnetic field manage to retain a very dense atmosphere?
Re:Ho Hum (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhh.. Slashdot. Where commenting about a misplaced apostrophe in an otherwise seemingly salient post is somehow more important than the subject the poster was writing about.
It doesn't matter that they were actually right or not. They dared to misuse an apostrophe. That makes them wrong. ;)
We won't even get into what happens when someone misuses a coma, or uses the wrong phoneme... there might be children present!