Jupiter once swallowed 10 times the planet Earth

Jupiter is a giant sphere of gas that is always in a boiling state, and it is difficult to see through thick clouds to see its core.

This is the fifth planet from the sun that is believed to have solid cores, quite small, but the Juno expedition ship of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) transmitted data to show that the central part of Jupiter has bile. more dilute and spread than still thought. Now, astronomers believe that the answer has been found: An ancient giant planet, weighing 10 times the Earth, crashed into the air sphere 4.5 billion years ago, the time of the system new sun was born.

Simulate the clash between Jupiter and its 'victim'.(Photo: Japan Center for Space Biology).

Juno began to revolve around Jupiter for more than three years, deploying a series of approaches to the planetarium and studying objects through various means. Based on the data Juno collected, researchers from Rice University (USA) and Sun Yat Sen University (China) proposed a new hypothesis to explain the strange state of Jupiter core . According to the Nature analysis, a fierce clash in the past affected the shifting core, mixing the solid core with gas or liquid layers above. As a result, the core is larger and thinner than before.

This idea was especially feasible at the time of the solar system in a chaotic state, the period before the planets went into orbit stable today. Astronomers still believe that a Mars-sized planet has plunged into Earth, created the Moon and brought water to the planet. The two moons of the red planet are more likely to be born this way, and some unusual features of Uranus (such as the horizontal axis of rotation and the frozen atmosphere) are also explained in the same way.

To demonstrate this idea, the team of experts made thousands of simulations of the Solar System at a young age. They found that up to 40% of Jupiter's ability to swallow another planet within the first few million years . And to create the core as it is now, it takes 10 times as much planet as Earth to do so.

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