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Is Jupiter Dissolving Its Rocky Core?
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."
get at least a quad core... time for an upgrade haha :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Just need to toss in several hundred thousand black monoliths, and we'll have a new star in the firmament.
Dark Reflection
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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Dissolving a solid into a liquid doesn't change it's mass.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No. It is estimated by the orbits of it's satellites, using Kepler's laws. If you know the period, eccentricity, and size of a satellite's orbit, you can work out the mass of the object that the satellite is orbitting. It has nothing to do with how much of that object is solid.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
and it also helps to keep our atmosphere in tact
Id never heard of this, can you explain? I had always understood that to be simply because of gravity. I knew the core was supposed to be the cause of our magnetosphere, but thats it.
Next thing you'll tell me is that a pound of feathers weighs as much of a pound of bricks!
This is not the funny you're looking for.
We know A LOT about the cores of the planets in the solar system from extensive study (including molten, material and other stuff that can be determined from external study). It appears you are talking about examining extrasolar planets. We don't have the capability, and it's doubtful we will, at least in our lifetime. Voyager1 just left the solar system and it's moving at ~35k MPH and it was launched in the 70's, most of the people that designed it are retired or dead and Voyager1 will be dead long before it reaches any other star.
You could just repost a version of that objection for almost any piece of science research without immediate applications...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The Magnetosphere helps keep solar winds from stripping our atmosphere away from us.
What maintains our atmosphere is the magnetic field generated by the liquid mantle rotating around the core. The magnetic field deflects the solar wind which would blow it off. It's thought by some that Mars lost it's atmosphere and surface water when the liquid mantle cooled and solidified. Mars has no magnetic field.
I knew the core was supposed to be the cause of our magnetosphere
That's a large part of the answer right there! The magnetosphere acts as a shield to keep a lot of harmful particles from the solar wind away, things which would work to strip away the atmosphere. Mars is an example of what can happen to planets that lack this. (Obviously, Mars' lower gravity works against it in this regard as well)
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Ice doesn't mean cold water. Ice is solid water. Water is liquid, solid, or gass depending on temperature and pressure. There is alot of pressure at the core of Jupiter.
I don't know about bricks and feathers, but a pound of sand weighs more than a pound of gold, even though an ounce of sand weighs less than an ounce of gold. Stupid customary units.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Oh no! We better drill a hole to the center of Jupiter and explode a nuclear bomb to fix it, because that makes sense!
Clearly DeBeers needs to hire you to lead their next ad campaign, "Diamonds are quite long-lasting relative to other materials, though they will eventually decay".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
High pressure from all that mass, possibly? Just speculating here.
OtakuBooty.com [otakubooty.com]: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Pick two.
âZ"We're pretty sure it has nothing to do with our decision to smash a huge plutonium powered space probe into it or with the resulting huge purple 'second spot' caused by the resulting plume, which was so large it was visible to backyard telescopes and in general was a sort of shocking embarrassment to NASA when it occured."
"No, this disintegration now suddenly occuring just a few years after that incident has nothing to do with us. Jupiter was in the middle of killing itself, anyways. It was only a matter of time before this happen."
"JUPITER WAS ASKING FOR IT, I SWEARS T'YA!"
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
You do realize that liquid rock has the exact same mass as solid, right?
That's mostly correct, but as heat is a form of energy and E=mc^2, a rock changed into liquid state would mean that it weighs oh-so-slightly more. For some napkin calculations: the specific heat of iron (at 273 K) is 0.45 J/(K g) meaning that if we had a thousand tons of iron (1E9 g) and increased the temperature 1000 K then the increase of mass would be: 0.45*1E9*1000/(3E8)^2 = 5E-3 g. All that mass and energy for a full 5 milligrams, which is why it's mostly negligible
Disclaimer: I know that the specific heat changes (quite a bit) with temperature but I wanted to keep the example simple.
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.
I'm not so sure about everything decaying over time. I thought everything decayed over time to its most-stable state; once a material was in that state, then theoretically it shouldn't decay any more, right?
The most-stable state for carbon is graphite I believe. So diamonds will eventually decay into pencil lead. But once they've turned into graphite, I don't think they'll decay any more.
Exactly. And what good is a newborn baby? Completely useless.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Which brings up the question: Which will happen first? Earth's core cooling to the point where we lose our atmosphere, or the Sun running out of fuel to the point where Earth can no longer sustain life (as we like it)?
Then how does Venus, which has almost no magnetic field manage to retain a very dense atmosphere?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Which brings up the question: Which will happen first? Earth's core cooling to the point where we lose our atmosphere, or the Sun running out of fuel to the point where Earth can no longer sustain life (as we like it)?
The correct answer is neither. Both of those are billions of years in the future. You forgot about a more immediate threat to the planet. Unless something drastic happens, the Human race will have made the earth devoid of life long before that. And even if we don't f' the planet up beyond all fixing, it wont matter because humans will either be extinct or will have colonized the galaxy by then.
Look at the composition.
Venus's atmosphere is very low in certain molecules.
Nitrogen.
Elemental oxygen.
Water vapor
Et al.
What it is high in, are comparatively dense gasses.
Sulfuric acid
Carbon dioxide
Etc.
The solar wind is highly energetic, but is comprised of small atomic mass particles. They lack the kinetic energy to strip away very heavy gasses with strong intermolecular forces. Water, while having strong intermolecular forces, is a very light molecule, and the high energy particles have sufficient energy to break the single covalent bonds that hold it together. This means the cosmic wind rips it apart, and then scours it out into space. Sulfuric acid and cabron dioxide, on the other hand, are very heavy, gravitate deeper into the gravity well, and in the case of co2, have double covalent bonds that are quite powerful. The solar wind doesn't have enough oomph to rip it apart, and the molecules are too heavy to easily blow away.
Mar's armosphere is actually sabotaged by a weak and incomplete magnetic field. It has many small and weak diploles extending from the surface. Under the influence of the solar wind, this actually pinches off large chunks of atmosphere during heavy flares from the sun. This is why mars has such a pronounced atmospheric loss, compared to venus, which doesn't have any discernable mgnetic field at all. If you note, the atmosphere mars does have is comprised of what? Co2.
To expand this a little -
Through fusion, lighter elements like hydrogen and lithium may be combined (nuclear). This process will provide a net energy output up to "iron."
Through fission, heavier elements may be disassociated (nuclear). This process will provide net energy output down to "iron."
When all you have left is iron, making something else via nuclear methods requires the addition of energy. Thus, "everything decays to iron" represents a lowest energy state from a nuclear perspective. But don't worry, the heat death of the universe won't happen for a long while.
Jupiter is no longer hard core.
We'll send special ships to the center of the earth with large hydrogen bombs that will restart the rotation of the core itself.
This is all documented here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
> GO POUND SAND
The pound sand doesn't appear to have an entrance.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
According to TFA, the MgSiO3 dissociates into SiO2 and MgO under Jovian core conditions. They don't calculate what happens to the SiO2, but assume that its solubility is similar to the MgO component. So that would mean that the SiO2 also goes into solution in the Jovian core.
Also of interest (at least to me) but not addressed in this paper is what happens to the nickel-iron component of the core. Perhaps they figure Jovians don't have enough to worry about, since they form so far from the center of the protoplanetary disk?
Mar's
Never has an apostrophe made me so sad.
Neither. As the sun gets older, it gets brighter (according to wikipedia, about an 10% increase in luminosity every billion years). At some point there will be no more liquid water available because the surface of our planet is too hot. This will happen long before the sun turns into an actual red giant, which in turn will happen long before it runs out of fuel.
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!
"For decades, commercial off-the-shelf rockets have been available to launch serious science payloads throughout the solar system."
silly citation needed meme inserted here
Prolly not, I hear Alzheimer's in 5-digit UIDs is rising.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.