Jupiter devoured many planets at the beginning of its formation...according to this study
A new study shows that Jupiter devoured many of the rocky planets in its infancy, according to the mineral content and its distribution on the planet.
The study is set to answer an important question related to the initial period of rock accretion: Did the planet gather larger masses of rock like the minor planets? Or did he collect pebble-sized materials?
According to the study, published in the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the key to Jupiter's formation and evolution is buried deep in the planet's atmosphere, which is tens of thousands of kilometers deep.
The authors of the paper said that the presence and distribution of pebbles in the planet's atmosphere plays a key role in understanding the formation of Jupiter, and the Gravity Science instrument was used to measure the dispersion of pebbles throughout the atmosphere.
The team built models of Jupiter's internal dynamics. "In this paper, we compile the most comprehensive and diverse set of internal models of Jupiter to date and use them to study the distribution of heavy elements in the planet's atmosphere," they wrote in their study.
The team created two sets of models; The first group is three-layer models and the second is models with a reduced center.
"There are two mechanisms for a gas giant like Jupiter to obtain minerals during its formation: through the accretion of small pebbles or small planets," said lead author Miguel.
"We know that once a young planet becomes big enough, it starts ejecting pebbles. It is impossible to achieve the mineral richness inside Jupiter that we see now before that. So we can rule out the scenario of only pebbles as solids during the formation of Jupiter."
The researchers also found that Jupiter's atmosphere is not as homogeneous as previously thought, as there are more minerals near the center of the planet compared to other layers, while the abundance of minerals in Jupiter's interior decreases with distance from the center, and this indicates a lack of convection in the atmosphere deep depths of the planet, which scientists thought existed.
"Earlier, we thought Jupiter had a heat transfer, like boiling water, which makes it quite mixed...but our findings show something else," Miguel said.
"We strongly demonstrate that the abundances of the heavy element are not homogeneous in Jupiter's atmosphere, and our results indicate that Jupiter continued to accumulate heavy elements in large quantities while its hydrogen and helium atmospheres were growing," the authors wrote in their paper.
It is reported that when Jupiter formed, it began accumulating rocky material, then followed by a period of rapid gaseous accumulation from the solar nebula, and after millions of years, Jupiter became the giant that it is today.
Detailed data on Jupiter was collected by NASA's Juno spacecraft, which arrived at it in July 2016, while changing our understanding of Jupiter's formation and evolution.
One of the features of Juno's mission is the "Gravity Science" instrument that sends radio signals back and forth between Juno and Earth's deep space network, measuring Jupiter's gravitational field and telling researchers more about the formation of the planet.
https://www.arageek.com/news/new-study-suggests-that-a-young-jupiter-gobbled-up-plenty-of-planetesimals?fbclid=IwAR3P43IHz96_BQ3ciayPBDwmdOOkcxt6OpzWL_L0rmrOdXq8h8y4dgZeV08