Scientists Find Remains of Cannibalized Baby Planets In Jupiter's Cloud-Covered Belly (space.com) 66
Jupiter's innards are full of the remains of baby planets that the gas giant gobbled up as it expanded to become the behemoth we see today, scientists have found. The findings come from the first clear view of the chemistry beneath the planet's cloudy outer atmosphere. Space.com reports: In the new study, researchers were finally able to peer past Jupiter's obscuring cloud cover using gravitational data collected by NASA's Juno space probe. This data enabled the team to map out the rocky material at the core of the giant planet, which revealed a surprisingly high abundance of heavy elements. The chemical make-up suggests Jupiter devoured baby planets, or planetesimals, to fuel its expansive growth. [...] [T]he researchers built computer models of Jupiter's innards by combining data, which was predominantly collected by Juno, as well as some data from its predecessor Galileo. The probes measured the planet's gravitational field at different points around its orbit. The data showed that rocky material accreted by Jupiter has a high concentration of heavy elements, which form dense solids and, therefore, have a stronger gravitational effect than the gaseous atmosphere. This data enabled the team to map out slight variations in the planet's gravity, which helped them to see where the rocky material is located within the planet. The researcher's models revealed that there is an equivalent of between 11 and 30 Earth masses of heavy elements within Jupiter (3% to 9% of Jupiter's mass), which is much more than expected.
The new models point to a planetesimal-gobbling origin for Jupiter because the pebble-accretion theory cannot explain such a high concentration of heavy elements. If Jupiter had initially formed from pebbles, the eventual onset of the gas accretion process, once the planet was large enough, would have immediately ended the rocky accretion stage. This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet. This curtailed rocky accretion phase would likely have given Jupiter a greatly reduced heavy metal abundance, or metallicity, than what the researchers calculated. However, planetesimals could have glommed onto Jupiter's core even after the gas accretion phase had begun; that's because the gravitational pull on the rocks would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas. This simultaneous accretion of rocky material and gas proposed by the planetesimal theory is the only explanation for the high levels of heavy elements within Jupiter, the researchers said.
The study also revealed another interesting finding: Jupiter's insides do not mix well into its upper atmosphere, which goes against what scientists had previously expected. The new model of Jupiter's insides shows that the heavy elements the planet has absorbed have remained largely close to its core and the lower atmosphere. Researchers had assumed that convection mixed up Jupiter's atmosphere, so that hotter gas near the planet's core would rise to the outer atmosphere before cooling and falling back down; if this were the case, the heavy elements would be more evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, it is possible that certain regions of Jupiter may have a small convection effect, and more research is needed to determine exactly what is going on inside the gas giant's atmosphere. The researchers' findings could also change the origin stories for other planets in the solar system. The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The new models point to a planetesimal-gobbling origin for Jupiter because the pebble-accretion theory cannot explain such a high concentration of heavy elements. If Jupiter had initially formed from pebbles, the eventual onset of the gas accretion process, once the planet was large enough, would have immediately ended the rocky accretion stage. This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet. This curtailed rocky accretion phase would likely have given Jupiter a greatly reduced heavy metal abundance, or metallicity, than what the researchers calculated. However, planetesimals could have glommed onto Jupiter's core even after the gas accretion phase had begun; that's because the gravitational pull on the rocks would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas. This simultaneous accretion of rocky material and gas proposed by the planetesimal theory is the only explanation for the high levels of heavy elements within Jupiter, the researchers said.
The study also revealed another interesting finding: Jupiter's insides do not mix well into its upper atmosphere, which goes against what scientists had previously expected. The new model of Jupiter's insides shows that the heavy elements the planet has absorbed have remained largely close to its core and the lower atmosphere. Researchers had assumed that convection mixed up Jupiter's atmosphere, so that hotter gas near the planet's core would rise to the outer atmosphere before cooling and falling back down; if this were the case, the heavy elements would be more evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, it is possible that certain regions of Jupiter may have a small convection effect, and more research is needed to determine exactly what is going on inside the gas giant's atmosphere. The researchers' findings could also change the origin stories for other planets in the solar system. The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Orifice Theory lives! (Score:1)
I was wondering what happened to Wankus and Vaginus, as only Uranus remains.
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Do I remember my mythology wrong? (Score:3)
Wasn't Saturn (or rather, Chronos) the one who ate his babies? Zeus (or Jupiter) was the one who refused to be eaten.
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Saturn ate his children in a psychotic rage. Chronos was framed and then murdered.
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What, no Uranus joke?
C'mon...
Re:Do I remember my mythology wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Chronos is Saturn.
Chronos is the Greek name. Saturn is the Roman name.
Same as Zeus => Jupiter, Poseiden => Neptune, etc.
Re:Do I remember my mythology wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
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Is it just me or does this all sound like some kind of metaphor for growing cultures? Just as a lot of fairy tales and even nursery rhymes [nurseryrhymecentral.com] are actually political speech and/or history, when I read something like this I think of the fates of nations. Whoever invents a deity knows they're not being honest (the difference between a cult and a religion is that in a religion, all the people in on the scam are dead*) but there's loads of possible reasons for doing so and not all of them are even religous, but oth
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This works for the L.Ron Hubbard/ Scientology style of inventing a religion as a tax scam and funding stream.
But I doubt that the antecedents of "Zeus" were invented with such "malice aforethought" (which in British law, used to be the difference between extended imprisonment and execution). Much more likely (and there is a metric shit-tonne of evidence on this, from anthropology to literary/ mythological analysis), each of the gods started out as a personification of a natural
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Wasn't Saturn (or rather, Chronos) the one who ate his babies? Zeus (or Jupiter) was the one who refused to be eaten.
Another poster pointed out that Zeus was a baby at the time, so refusal on his part had nothing to do with it. However, I should point out that Zeus did sort of eat one of his babies by proxy by eating one of his pregnant mistresses. He was trying to avert a prophecy that she would bear him a son who would overthrow him. Presumably, with the child being apparently a full-blown god with ichor running in its veins, abortion or plain old murdering the mother would not work, so he ate her. Then the child contin
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Nah, get your mythology straight, that guy is eaten by his followers as some sort of weird torture-cannibalizing ritual, but he's killed as an adult.
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They had to have him resurrected so that you could eat his body and blood without feeling bad about it, and also so that their ritual sacrifice would be different from the ritual sacrifices performed by the other people who they said their religion was superior to, and also by the way totally not a cheap ripoff of.
Re:Scientists Find Remains of (Score:3)
Re:Scientists Find Remains of (Score:5, Funny)
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This doesn't make sense (Score:2)
FTA:
"This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet."
This doesn't make sense to me. A pebble comes along in space and assuming it doesn't burn up in the atmosphere what's preventing gravity pulling it down to the rocky core?
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imagine thicker gas
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So which gas is denser than rock?
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I didn't do any math but I assume that any gas compressed enough could possibly be denser than rock.
Re: This doesn't make sense (Score:3)
Doesn't have to be denser. A lot of crap that approaches Earth just skips off the atmosphere.
Re:This doesn't make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
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You could say the same about water but I don't notice many floating rocks in the ocean other than pumice.
Re:This doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, you can easily bounce a small stone off the surface of the water, and with skill bounce it several times. The pebbles of the accretion model aren't starting at rest with respect to the surface of Jupiter, so it's not just a question of density. Bear in mind also that Apollo re-entry vehicles famously had to come in at a steep enough angle that they didn't bounce off Earth's atmosphere.
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That's difficult to achieve in an accretion scenario. But relatively easy to have happen in a near-miss encounter, which may be an accretion event on the next pass of the particle, after it has been subject to non-trivial drag from the simultaneously-accreting gaseous material.
Note : ignore what TFA says. Read TFP, linked to from TFS, where the scientists (not the journalist) are talking about planete
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I think I read this when the preprint came out. Yes, I did, back in March, and I clearly considered it for posting here, but decided it wasn't interesting enough.
This is Slashdot, where they have to post the same stories multiple times to make it look like there is available content. This is Slashdot, where the guy who talks the most shit about the platform (me) gets his story on aphantasia accepted ;) This is Slashdot, where we get umpty-ump stories about crypto in one day. It was interesting enough.
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Between one thing and another, I haven't got anything submitted this year.
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Oh that's OK, you don't want to do all that stuff because they will edit your summary anyway. Pick out some links and kind of throw them together and you're done :D
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[This is not a paid advert ; I am not @MineralCup].
Rocks float in water perfectly well, as long as the water is below 0 degC (footnote) and the rock is added from the top.
footnote Strictly, as long as the water in in
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Not sure how you feel about concrete as "rock" but concrete canoe contests are quite popular as well. Also, at least one working stone boat has been carved as an art project.
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Many geology students have made the mistake of examining a lump of concrete as a breccia ... until they actually step back and look at the rock in the whole. I've avoided that particular mistake myself, but had to struggle with microscopic samples of concrete (where the coarse fraction of the aggregate component is a fine sand) when we've been trying to "kick of
Re: This doesn't make sense (Score:2)
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I'll refute their lack of refutation. The pull of gravity on the gases is stronger because it's closer to the core. The little rocks never get close enough for the pull to be as strong.
Re:This doesn't make sense (Score:4, Informative)
That's because you're reading the journalism of the commentary (also known as "popular science"), instead of the actual paper. For a change, the Slashdot editors have linked to the original paper in TFS ; there's also the as-printed PDF at https://www.aanda.org/articles... [aanda.org]
I have no idea whatsoever how the journalist at Space.com got to making up the statement you're complaining about. The abstract (written by the scientists, to communicate their findings; not written by journalists to propagate the journalist's incomprehension) states :
No mythical "pressure barrier" (which is obviously powered by dilithium crystals in a dispersed Scotty field) stopping anything from going anywhere, but a continuing supply of heavy-element (Z>=3) materials coming in during the accretion of the H-He envelope. Precisely the opposite of the journalist's invented "pressure barrier".
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Never waste your time reading "popular science" journalism if you can get hold of the paper. The journalists have to stoke their own egos by adding their interpretation of science they don't understand, and haven't got the time to understand. RTFP!
There's a whole additional conversation about how research normally paid for from the public purse often ends up behind a paywall of commercial publication, but in this case A&A have done the right thing and published the paper under Open Access conditions.
I was about to embark on my regular rant about journalists typically having degrees in English, crystal healing and/or aromatherapy, but I thought I'd better check : firstly the article on Space.com seems to have been written, possibly previously published on "Live Science", whoever they are. Sorry, but I don't know how these site inter-relate - I very rarely read either, and then it's only to find links to the papers. But the author [space.com] 'studied Marine Biology at the University of Exeter [...] and after graduating started his own blog site "Marine Madness," '. Which is a considerable step in the right direction from aroma-healing and crystal-therapy. But I still can't see how he (probably) got from the findings of the paper to inventing a "pressure barrier".
Totally unrelated - what is it about crystals that let them be so often injured and in need of healing, and why was this never mentioned (except possibly as the migration of lattice defects being a factor in the responses of crystals to differential stress fields) in the 4 years of my mineralogy courses?
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[W]hat is it about crystals that let them be so often injured and in need of healing, and why was this never mentioned (except possibly as the migration of lattice defects being a factor in the responses of crystals to differential stress fields) in the 4 years of my mineralogy courses?
Give it time. The way higher education is going, they'll get there eventually.
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Probably taste foul though. Need to dip the spit in super-hot chilli sauce before starting the insertion process and asking the meal for a screaming commentary.
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Totally unrelated - what is it about crystals that let them be so often injured and in need of healing, and why was this never mentioned (except possibly as the migration of lattice defects being a factor in the responses of crystals to differential stress fields) in the 4 years of my mineralogy courses?
My understanding is that crystal healing is mostly due to the placebo effect. So the logical conclusion seems to be that crystals tend to be hypochondriacs.
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Unlike the claims underlying "crystal healing".
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That's just it though, hypochondria is a real thing. My theory is that hypochondria is why crystals always need so much healing.
Cannibalism is the eating of human flesh by humans (Score:2)
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I mean, I totally agree with you. That headline had me horrified until I got to the word "Planets", but you're blaming the wrong entity: That IS the headline on the actual article. Blame space.com or even the authors of the study?
It's proper usage. (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
cannibalize verb
cannibalize | \ ka-n-b-lz
transitive verb
5 astronomy, of a celestial object : to incorporate mass from (a nearby object) through gravitational attraction
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But the eating of human flesh is anthropophagy (Gk anthropos- human + -phagos eating). It only becomes cannibalism when it is done by humans (and according to some people, only when done by a group of humans. See also : anthropophage or anthropophagous [wikipedia.org].
It reminds me of my youth. In a good way [youtube.com], including several industrial-grade puns. "y
Gut-wrenching headlines (Score:1)
"Scientists Find Remains of Cannibalized Baby Planets In Jupiter's Cloud-Covered Belly"
You know the clickbait is getting bad when science headlines are written by a jungle abortion doctor.
Dial that shit down already. Title alone turned the content sour beyond reading.
That's no planet (Score:1)
OMG! Think of the children!!! (Score:2)
Let's destroy Jupiter!
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Didn't the orange guy want to nuke Jupiter because it kept giving him "the disrespectful eye"?
Cannibalized babies? (Score:2)
Baby planets? (Score:1)
Are they bigger than Pluto? If so, Pluto is a planet.
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You've got that backwards. Baby planets is a cute term for planitesimals. Pluto is such a thing.
It just isn't a full blown planet sitting at the round table anymore.
Personally, I prefer this definition: A heavenly body is a planet if:
1. It is big enough to pull itself into a ball
2. It is in orbit about a star, and not about another planet.
3. It has cleared its orbital path largely of other asteroids and space junk.
From what I understand there are 30-50 such planets in our solar system alone!
Make grade sc
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"But that's 50 planets!"
"So?"
These same asshole astronomers, in 100 years, will support Earth dictators who want to stop colonists fleeing Earth
Journalism moving at space-time dilation scale... (Score:2)
Science journalism often delays stories to align with journal publication timescales, so 4-6-mont
Did Jupiter... (Score:2)
Jupiter should be expelled! (Score:2)
There is no excuse for cannibalism in today's day and age. How barbaric!
Pluto got expelled from the planetary system for far less. Sure, it may be cold and distant, but at least it never ate any baby planets!
The Solar System just isn't safe with a big bully like Jupiter around. Time to say enough is enough!
Cat tung (Score:2)
Stopped pebbles. This is super dense gas and the falling pebbles slow to a crawl or stop, while small planets still ram in.
To put it similarly, the sun is 100% gas/plasma, but about 2/3 the way down, it's as dense as water.