Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could Jupiter turn into a star?

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

What is the fate of the largest planet in our solar system? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, do you ever think about what the night sky looked like to our ancestors? I do. I wonder how it looked at them. And I also like thinking even further back in the past. Like, what did the dinosaurs see in the sky? Yeah, they probably should have looked at the sky more carefully, you know, looking for meteors, for example. I know dinosaur astronomers totally fell down on the job.

But you can even think further back, like the first eyeballs on Earth 500 million years ago. You mean like microbe astronomers? Or, you know, think to the future. I wonder what the night sky will look like to humans billions of years from now. It could be totally different. I mean, if there even are humans, then. Yeah, well, I'm thinking about the future cockroach astronomers and hoping they will keep an eye on the stars for us.

I hope whatever they see doesn't bug them. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and that was the first time I ever said cockroach on the podcast. And astronomers in the same sentence, publicly. I love astronomers. I love astronomy. I'm nothing but pro-astronomer. I do like the idea of dinosaur astronomers. That's pretty cool. My favorite story about dinosaur astronomers is that they really did have a chance to save themselves. Your favorite, I feel like you thought about this before.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, the meteor that came and wiped out the dinosaurs made a near pass by the Earth 10 years earlier. No way. Yeah, and came close enough that they should have been able to look up and see it in the sky. So if they had funded their version of NASA, they could have saved their own lives.

In 10 years, you think dinosaurs could have built spaceships? Necessity is the mother invention, right? You think they should have called the dinosaur Bruce Willis, put him on a spaceship and get him to deflect that essence? asteroid in 10 years? Well, you know, the other option is what happened. So anything is better than that. But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge talk about dinosaur astronomers. That's all we do. Daniel and Jorge digress in the very first moments of the podcast. That's right. Now, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained the universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we talk about

all the amazing and beautiful and crazy things about the universe, the violent events, the incredible drama happening in the inside of stars, the tiny little particles that apparently make up everything you see and touch and taste. Yeah, all of the spacey stuff out there happening in the universe and even in our own backyards, or I guess our solar system backyard. That's right, because when you look out into the night sky, you are not seeing a still picture. You are not seeing a flat image. You are seeing a drama unfolding on cosmic distance scales and time scales. If you were to look at the night sky sped up a little bit, you would see incredible events. huge explosions, massive collisions, it would put Hollywood to shame.

It's like a cosmological telenovela, a lot of twist and turns. I don't know if anybody's really like backstabbing anybody or, you know. Does the Earth have an evil twin on the other side of the sun, planet X? Dun, dun, down, extreme close-up. I don't know if there's so much political intrigue, but there is definitely drama. There are things that happen rapidly all of a sudden. There are sudden changes of fate. There are things that are happening.

And so I think it's fun to think about how our solar system will evolve. Yeah, because as we as humans found out about 100 years ago, the universe is not static. Things are changing. The stars are moving. The galaxies are blazing across the universe. And new stars are being born all the time. That's right. And stars can change, right?

They are formed from the collapse of gases into a hot, dense object that can fuse, eventually turn into something else like a black hole or a white dwarf. They go through this evolution. And so it's natural to also wonder, like, what about planets? Do planets have future stages in their evolution? Are they like Pokemon? They can evolve into different versions. They're saying the Earth is only stage one? I don't know enough about Pokemon to even really make that joke.

I just watch my kids play so I can say energy cards and Pokemon's evolve. Then we're at the end of my knowledge. I think our planet is Earth type. Is it an X or a GX? Does it have the shiny glint on it? It used to. thinking you see I was shining Clint to it. That's right. And we did a podcast recently in which we talked about Jupiter and how close Jupiter was to having become a star.

And a bunch of listeners wrote in asking us about that. Jim Sanchez, Doug Dodds and Ryan Kirkus all wrote in and asked us like, well, is Jupiter on the verge of becoming a star? Could it one day eventually become a star? Because I guess it's kind of a fine line between being a giant cloud of dust and being a giant gas planet. and maybe being a giant ball of flaming gas like the sun. It's kind of a fine line, it turns out. How fine a line is it? Either on fire or you're not.

That seems pretty clear cut to me. Well, I mean, what does it take? Like a match or, you know, a spark? I guess that's the question we'll be talking about today. That's right. So to the end of the program, we'll be asking the question. Could Jupiter become a star? Is it too late for Jupiter?

or can it still, you know, find the right role and suddenly be the new darling of Hollywood? Hey, you know, jump onto TikTok and anybody can become a star. Oh, hey, that's what Jupiter needs. That's right. But there was some actual serious talk about this a couple of decades ago. NASA sent a probe out to study Jupiter, and they didn't want the probe to infect any of Jupiter's moons, where we think there might potentially be life, right? Microbia life.

And we didn't want to crash Galileo this probe onto any of Jupiter's moons. because we didn't want to bring any Earth's microbes. Once you bring Earth's microbes, you can no longer ask, like, are there native microbes? And so instead, they crashed the probe into Jupiter itself. Oh, because we don't care about infecting Jupiter? I think the idea was that it would burn up and get crushed because Jupiter has this incredible atmosphere. So we'd get immolated in descent, whereas the moons don't have those atmospheres.

And so it would actually land on the surface and potentially survive. But there was some concern about that. Yeah, people were wondering, like, if Jupiter is on the verge of becoming a star, if it's this huge ball of gas and you drop a match into it, essentially, is there a possibility that it could have ignited the atmosphere of Jupiter and birth a new star? Because, I mean, Jupiter, if you think about it, it's a giant ball of hydrogen, right? Kind of like the Hindenberg. Kind of like the Hindenberg, but much bigger.

That's what I mean. It's like a big balloon made out of hydrogen, and all you need is a little flame and some oxygen. Mm-hmm. All of a sudden, it sounds very unstable, right? It does. It sounds like a bad 1920s idea. Yeah, and, you know, this actually appears in science fiction as well, in the well-known series 2001, 2010, et cetera. They turn Jupiter into a star. Oh, on purpose. Yeah, on purpose, I guess.

You know, the aliens, we don't really ever understand their psychology, but they turn it into a new star. They call it Lucifer. Nice. The aliens call it Lucifer? I don't remember the details of that book, who calls it Lucifer, whether it's the aliens. aliens naming it, or, you know, Earthbound cartoonists who were elected to a naming committee who gave it that name. But I do remember the sequel to 2001, 2010, I think, that at the end, Jupiter does become

a star, oh, sorry, spoiler, Jupiter becomes a star at the end of that movie. And I was wondering, like, oh, that's pretty interesting, but what does that mean? Is that going to change our solar system or what's the big deal? Yeah, exactly. So it's an interesting question. It's right here in our backyard. It seems relevant. So we thought we would try to figure out how close is Jupiter to becoming a star?

If you wanted to turn it into a star, what would you have to do? So as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet and asked people to submit their answer to the question. Could Jupiter become a star? That's right. So thank you to everybody who participated. And if you'd like to participate in future rounds of person on the internet interviews, please send us a note to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com. We'd love for you to answer our questions. So before you listen to these answers, think about it for a second. Do you think Jupiter could become a star?

Here's what people had to say. I think anyone who claims to know whether Jupiter can turn into a star, absolutely, is probably exaggerating their knowledge in order to make up deficiencies. I think Jupiter is like a failed star because it's not massive enough to have the fusion reactions at the core. The only way I can think of that it could become a star would be if it pulled in enough matter. Well, it didn't for a reason, I suppose. Not enough mass. I didn't hear that it almost became a star.

But, well, maybe if another planet struck it. I think the universe is very unlikely to happen, but it happened. So perhaps it's just as unlikely that Jupiter would turn into a star, but I suppose it could happen. Yes. I mean, no. What kind of star? Jupiter is a gas giant and it's made of gas and stars are also made of gas. So I think maybe if a smaller star came into it...

I suppose if it became big enough and had enough gravity, it could turn on and become a star. but I'm not aware that it's growing. My short answer is I don't think so. Yes. I think that it's eight times more massive that it would need to become in order for Jupiter to start burning hydrogen and fusing it into helium.

But even if you were to combine all the planets in the solar system, you wouldn't get to the mass needed. So by natural means, no, it's not possible. but theoretically, could Jupiter become a star, then yes, you just need to add eight more Jupiters to it. If Jupiter's new AP does extremely well, I think Jupiter might be able to become a star. Oh, no. Anyone can be a star with a good enough Instagram.

Oh, my gosh. I believe that the gas giants have cleaned up our solar system enough that it is unlikely that Jupiter would be able to get enough mass. to turn into a star. Well, theoretically possible, it's unlikely, I think. The way that it might happen is maybe if there are a rogue planet that collided with Jupiter or sufficient other material like comets and asteroids and so on. But that seems implausible. All right. Some great answers. I like the one that said, yes. I mean, no. Wait, what's a star? If you're not going to be accurate, you should at least be enthusiastic, right?

Well, I guess that perfectly reflects how I feel. I'm like, yes, no, wait, let's define a star. Yeah, I think it is an interesting question because, you know, different stuff out there have evolutions. You know, we see stuff changing in the universe. And we haven't ever talked about the question of like, is a planet stable? Could a planet just hang out forever?

Or does it have a next natural stage in its evolution? Yeah. Is this possible that we suddenly have, two stars in our sky, you know, kind of like Star Wars. Yeah, yeah. What would that mean for when you have to go to work? It would probably make our days longer. Yeah, it would make our days longer and much more irregular, right?

You wouldn't have regular patterns. You'd have times when both stars were in the sky and times when only one of them was in the sky. If you ever read the three body problem, you know that the calendar on that planet is very complicated. All right, let's jump into it, Daniel. What makes something a star versus a planet, I guess? Let's start with that question. what happens at that fork in the road for a big ball of gas where it either turns into a Jupiter or it turns into a star

and or can it switch over? Yeah, so really it's all about mass. Like if you are a big enough blob of stuff, then gravity will pull you in and compress you hard enough that you will start to fuse. You'll create the conditions necessary to squish these particles together so they fuse, which releases a huge amount of energy. And that's really the distinction between a planet and a star.

A star is fusing, it's releasing energy, it's burning itself, and a planet is much more inert. There's no fusion happening at the center of the earth or at the center of Jupiter, for example. And that's just because we don't have enough stuff. Like if we had more stuff, it would be heavier and things would get more compressant. You would sort of get to that pressure where fusion happens. That's right. It's all about the stuff. And it depends on which kind of stuff.

Like if you're just hydrogen, just gas, then you need less stuff than if you were like, like a huge ball of oxygen or carbon because the heavier elements take higher pressure or higher temperature conditions in order to fuse. So hydrogen is the easiest. So if you're going to go all hydrogen, you need a big ball of gas. If you're going to go all carbon or all oxygen or something heavier, you need a bigger goal. But in principle, if you took the earth and made it much more massive, same stuff, same mixture of stuff, it would turn into a star. Wow. How much more stuff, I guess? I guess the question is, what does it take to be a star? How much stuff do you need? We can think about it in terms of like pounds or kilograms or squirrels, but those units are hard to grasp because the numbers are so big.

Let's just talk about it in terms of stuff. So let's talk about it in terms of units of like one sun. So the minimum amount of stuff you need to reach any sort of fusion is about one one hundredth of the mass of the sun. Of our sun. Of our sun. Yeah, we're using our sun here as a unit. You could have something one one hundredth of our sun and it could be a star. That's right.

And that's only like really special. That's the absolute minimum. It gets you above the shelf for the lowest, weakest, lamest kind of fusion. And if you reach that threshold, you're called a brown dwarf. And it's a special kind of fusion. It's not just hydrogen fusion. It's deuterium fusion. And deuterium, if you remember, is an isotope of hydrogen.

In the nucleus, you have a proton and a neutron, not just a proton. And that neutron is crucial because it helps sort of bring those protons together and stick them together. I see. That sounds small, like 100th the size of the sun, but that's like, what, like 10,000 Earth? That's, yes, something like 10,000 Earth. It's a lot bigger than the Earth. And so it's not that small, right? I mean, it's small compared to our Sun, but it's a big object. And they're called brown dwarfs, but they're pretty badly named because they're not actually brown. They're not actually dwarfs if they're 10,000 Earth. Also, so two strikes there for the physics community in one name.

Wharfs compared to the other stars, but they don't look at all brown. Okay. They look magenta or like orange-red. And that's just because of the kind of fusion that happens and the kind of light that they emit. I see. But there are still sort of big balls of fiery stuff. Yeah. They just don't glow as brightly and they're kind of tinged in a certain color.

And these things exist. And they're not that rare in the universe. There's one like six and a half light years away from us. It's called Luman 16. And so they're not that easy to see because they're not that bright. but, you know, theoretically, we understand that they should exist and we see them out there. I mean, so this is totally a possibility. It's the minimum threshold to become a star.

And then those are the smallest stars. So then what's the next step up? Next step up is, you know, really you might call the first kind of real star. And this is a red dwarf. A brown dwarf, people argue, like, you know, is it a big hot burning planet? Is it a star that's kind of lame? But a red dwarf nobody argues about. Like, it's definitely a star.

It burns hydrogen. Like, essentially, this is the minimum star you need if you just start from hydrogen. If you have one-tenth the mass of the sun and a huge ball of hydrogen gas, gravity will pull it together and squeeze it hard enough for it to fuse. But in a brown star, there's no fusion? There is fusion, but it's deuterium fusion. It's not hydrogen fusion. A brown star is not hot enough to fuse hydrogen.

You need that extra neutron in the nucleus to make the fusion happen. And so the fusion doesn't release as much energy either. Oh, I see. So there's sort of like a cooler, weaker, lamer kind of fusion. But it's still fusion. It's just kind of an easier fusion. It's easier and it's not as dramatic. It doesn't produce as much energy.

So that's why the brown dwarfs aren't so luminous. I see. All right. So then when you get to one tenth of the mass of the sun, then you get the real cooking going. That's right. That's a legit star. It's a red dwarf. And, you know, there's one that's only 600 light years away.

It has a name that's all like letters and acronyms. So it's totally unpronounceable. But the cool thing about it is that it's really. dense. Like, it has one-tenth the mass of the sun, but its radius is the same as Saturn. Wow. So it's tiny, but it's compact. It's a little dwarf. It's a little red dwarf. It's perfectly named. And is it red? Is it red, Daniel? So there you go. Two check marks for the astronomy community in terms of gaming. You're up to zero then. Zero, zero. Zero, Zero. Zero physicists. This is zero public.

But, you know, something the size of a planet can definitely be a star. That's not an issue. It's not just about size. It's about mass. Remember, gravity will gather this stuff together and make it really dense for you. Density, yeah. All right. Well, it's clear that things about the size of planets can become stars. And so now let's talk about Jupiter and whether Jupiter could or could have become a star. But first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkP X-1 carbon powered by Intel Core Alter processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in. plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back

to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. whether Jupiter could be one day become a star, which is a crazy idea. But you're telling me that it's all about the stuff.

If you have enough stuff and you compress it enough, then almost anything can become a star. Yeah. And so let's talk about Jupiter. How massive is Jupiter? Jupiter has about one-tenth of one percent of the mass of the sun. So one-one-thousandth of the sun. Okay. So it's 10 times too small to be a brown dwarf.

Yeah. So remember, the threshold is 100th of the sun for a brown dwarf, one-tenth of the sun. one-tenth of the sun for a red dwarf. And so Jupiter, yeah, it's 10 times too small to be a brown dwarf and a hundred times too small to be a red dwarf. Okay. And it's made out of roughly the right stuff. It's mostly hydrogen.

It's just not a big enough spoonful of it. I see. And you need that stuff because, I mean, while you, like the Earth could become a star if you compress it down enough, but there's nothing really compressing the Earth that much, except for its gravity. And so without that stuff to create the gravity, you can't turn into a star. Yeah, the Earth is like one 300,000th the size of the sun.

And so we're nowhere near massive enough to ever become a star. Jupiter's like, it's in within shouting distance, you know, like 10 times too small to be a pathetic little brown dwarf is like, it's, you know, 10 times is not a small thing to overcome. Wow. But it's still 10 times too small. Like that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. No. And Jupiter is already really big, right? So essentially, in order for Jupiter become a star, you have to multiply its.

mass by a factor of 10. That means, like, gather nine more Jupiters somewhere, somehow, and add it to Jupiter. All right. Well, it doesn't sound very likely then that Jupiter is going to turn into a star. Why was NASA worried about it 20, 30 years ago? You know, I think they just thought that crashing a probe into it could spark a reaction. You know, the process we're talking about is sort of a natural gathering due to gravity. You know, the Hindenburg went into flames without being the mass of the sun.

and so people were just worried that adding a spark to a ball of gas could potentially ignite it. But I think that was a small community of paranoid voices inside NASA and most people weren't too worried. But you know, if you know the story, we were worried about igniting the atmosphere when we tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. Oh, really? Yeah. That was a possible concern? Yeah. Before they tested it, they did the calculations and they couldn't rule out igniting the atmosphere.

But, you know, they went ahead and tried it anyway. What's the worst that can happen? So it's not just particle physicists that are potentially ending the world, okay? Oh, good. It's other kinds of physicists. That's right. And even ending potentially other worlds. Yeah, so if you wanted to turn Jupiter into a star, you'd have to somehow gather these materials.

Yeah, let's talk about that. If you were an alien in the Arthur C. Clark novel, how would you do it? Well, you know, where can you get these materials? Like, what is the source of raw materials? you'd need to turn Jupiter into a star. There's really the biggest things in the solar system are the sun and Jupiter. And after that, everything else is a tiny detail. So the only place to get this stuff is from the sun.

So you'd have to basically steal from the sun, siphon off a huge amount of matter and, you know, feed that into Jupiter somehow. Really? There's not enough gas floating around or asteroids floating around to kind of feed Jupiter? There's only a tiny little bit of gas and asteroids. Most of the stuff has coalesced into the sun and into Jupiter. And, you know, even Jupiter is like a tiny fraction. Remember, it's one one thousandths of the mass of the sun. So if you, like, made a bar chart of all the stuff in the solar system, it would basically just be the sun and then, you know, a few crumbs.

So Jupiter is just like the biggest crumb. And after that, there's basically nothing of note. All right. So you would need Jupiter to be 10 times bigger. And so maybe let's talk about how that would look like. Like, let's say we increase the mass of Jupiter by two. How would it look different? It wouldn't have enough energy to fuse.

use, right? And so it would just look like a bigger Jupiter. It would just, you know, be bigger and fatter. And it would have just as many crazy storms, but there'd be really no fundamental change. It might emit more radiation because it would have more activity in the interior due the increased pressure. Like the surface would look sort of the same? Would just be bigger. It would just be bigger. Yeah. And the surface would look sort of the same. But we don't really understand Jupiter's like cloud patterns and what's going on there, the crazy vortices, the red spot. That's the kind of thing we don't understand. And if we increase Jupiter's mass, then all the features that contribute to that craziness would be doubled. And so we'd probably get it as,

you know, twice as many bands and much more craziness. And maybe the red spot would be even more insane. Right. But there are a lot of questions about these gas giants. Remember, Saturn has a hexagon on its North Pole that we don't understand either. Right. We did a whole podcast about that mystery. It'd be a fascinating experiment to do to double the mass of Jupiter and just see what happens like, hey, turn that knob and see how crazy these planets get. Yeah, let's do it, Daniel. Okay, I'll write a proposal. What's the worst that can happen? Well, what would be happening on the inside? Like, I know that the inside of Jupiter, there's like, what is it, frozen hydrogen or something? Metallic hydrogen. This metallic hydrogen, yeah. This oceans of liquid hydrogen is all these layers

of more and more compressed hydrogen. And as you add more stuff to it, then those layers get denser and denser, right, until at the very core, that's where the fusion would begin when you get enough mass. I see. You sort of like gradually approach it and you get these layers and layers of more intensely squeezed hydrogen. Okay. So then as I increase the mad, let's say I'm pouring more hydrogen into Jupiter.

Now we're at like four times the size of Jupiter right now or the mass. Do things still change? Like, you know, does it suddenly become more solid at the core or does it become like a this kind of nebulous ball of gas or would it look the same just bigger? It would look the same just bigger. I don't know that you would see much different from the outside. Again, we don't understand the patterns on the surface, so it's hard to predict what those would look like. But on the inside, you'd be getting new layers. You'd be getting the core would be denser, right? As you add more mass, you're creating new layers in the core that are denser and hotter. And eventually you're going to make the one

that's going to fuse. I wonder if it would grow another eye. Wouldn't that be cool? That would be totally awesome. In fact, we'd wonder if that happened if it was typical or unusual. So really, we should replicate this project. We should make like 10, you know, double Jupiters or 10 quad Jupiters just to see if it's systematic or not. Wow. I mean, while we're scooping matter out of the sun and playing God, let's be systematic about it. Let's have fun with it.

All right. So now let's say I keep going and now I've pumped up Jupiter up to one, one hundredth the size of the mass of the sun, where it could become a brown dwarf. I guess would it just automatically turn into a brown dwarf or does it need like some kind of event to trigger it or does it happen slowly? Jupiter wouldn't actually turn into a brown dwarf if you got it to 1-100 the mass of the sun because that's a special kind of process. It needs Deuterium. And if we're just adding hydrogen, remember which is just protons and electrons, that needs to get to 1 tenth the mass of the sun. Deuterium is a special thing and you need a proton and a neutron and the electron around it.

And the neutron helps that fusion happen. You might think like, well, that's weird. How's a neutron help fusion happen? It's neutral anyway, right? Remember, neutrons are these bound objects of quarks that have the strong force. The neutron is what helps hold things together. Like in heavier elements, the neutron is the reason why the element is stable. It keeps the protons separated and the little residual strong force from the quarks helps tie everything together.

So the neutrons are like the little helper assistant particles, making the fusion happen. So Brown dwarfs use this special channel only available when you have deterioration. I see. So Jupiter isn't mostly deuterium. It's mostly hydrogen. Oh, man.

All right. So I did all this work. I inflated Jupiter to 10 times in size. And apparently nothing happens. Yeah, exactly. So let's keep going. Let's keep pressing the accelerator and see what happens to Jupiter.

But first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves.

Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered, by Intel Core Alter processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th,

1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to see. Stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK. Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, if I pump up Jupiter to one one hundred the size of the sun or the mass of the sun, nothing would happen. I would need to take it to one tenth of the mass of the sun in order

for Jupiter to be a star. That's right. Make a blob of gas that's one tenth the mass of the sun, then gravity will coalesce it and it will start to fuse and it will start to glow and it will be a new star and you can name it whatever you like. Well, now I feel all this pressure to come up with a good name.

Basically you need 100 Jupiter's you need Jupiter to be a hundred times bigger or more massive in order for it to ever become a star and even then it would be a red dwarf which is not like the shiniest prettiest kind of star. That's right. It'd be much smaller than our star and not as bright.

And would it ignite right away, or is this like a slow burn where it slowly turns into a red dwarf? Well, it depends on how dense it is when you start. Like, if you just start from a big diffused cloud of gas, the way our solar system started, then it's going to take a long time for gravity to pull that together. If you start from a place where it's already pretty dense, like about as dense as Jupiter, then it's not going to take gravity that long because everything is already pretty close together. Oh, I see. But it will start to burn from the inside, right?

And then that will have to heat up the next layers and the next layers and the next layers. And so this isn't the kind of thing that's going to happen, you know, in five seconds. But it's also not going to take a million years. Oh, I see. It's going to start at the inside and then the heat, the explosion of that, it's going to gradually make it to the surface. And then that's when you'll see it glow, like a star. Exactly. And it's just like any other kind of fire, you know, the energy put out by it, sustains it, keeps that temperature hot, keeps those fusion processes going.

All right. Well, it sounds like we're not likely to get 100 Jupiter's all in the same spot suddenly, although it's kind of cool to think about. And so maybe step us through what is the future of Jupiter? What's going to happen to it? It's not going to become a star, but what is it going to become? Yeah. And even if Jupiter did become a star, like if it turned on, I just want to mention that it's not going to be as bright as our sun. And it's much further from us, right? Jupiter is much further from us than the sun is. So even if it became a star, it wouldn't be nearly as bright in our sky as the sun. It wouldn't even be as bright in a sky as the moon is. Actually, one of our sharp listeners did this calculation. Dimitri Roudoy found that a red dwarf would be a bit brighter than the moon in our sky. Thanks for keeping us honest, Dimitri.

So it would just be like a fairly bright star in the sky. Oh, really? Yeah. Even as is, without inflating it, Jupiter, if suddenly Jupiter ignited became a star, which we said it couldn't happen. Even if you turn Jupiter into a red dwarf, if you made it 100 times as big and it ignited and it was a red dwarf, it wouldn't be as bright as our sun and it's much further away from us.

So it would appear dimmer in our sky. So it wouldn't be very bright. Oh, the distance from us to the sun is much closer than us to Jupiter. Yeah. Oh, wow. Jupiter is six times as far away from the sun as we are, which means that at its closest approach, It's like four times as far away from Earth as the sun is.

And so that makes it one 16th as bright if it was the same brightness as the sun. But it's going to be much smaller than the sun at the minimum threshold. And so it would be just not that bright in the sky compared to the sun or even the moon. So pretty much nothing would change if Jupiter suddenly became a star. Yeah, it wouldn't really change at all. I mean, it wouldn't be as bright as Elon Musk's Starlink satellites even. We wouldn't get that dramatic too. suns floating in the sky, Luke Skywalker looking out into the sundown of two stars. It would just

be like a bright star in the sky. Yeah. And so for that to happen to have like two effective suns in your sky, you really need a second star that's as big, as bright and as close. That's really critical. And that that would probably be kind of a mess, wouldn't it? Like if you had two sons that close together to each other and to you, it wouldn't be a happy solar system. Yeah. And if you somehow created that sun and then inserted into our existing solar system, there's no way that any of our orbits would be stable, right? It would like completely gravitationally perturb all the orbits. Like say, for example, a huge sun came and ate Jupiter, like some sun from another solar system happen to intersect our solar system and just gobbled up Jupiter. And then

we call that the new Jupiter for some reason. That would totally destroy our solar system. Like Earth would get flung out into interstellar space. There's almost no chance that all the planets would then, like, suddenly fall into a new stable set of orbits around this pair of suns. Like, that's very unlikely. It would just totally disrupt our orbits and probably tosses out into space. Yeah. Yeah, we'd become a rogue planet. We'd end up with no stars.

All right. Well, so then what is more likely to happen to Jupiter? What is Jupiter's most likely as future? Jupiter's future is actually not that exciting. I mean, planets are pretty stable. They're just hunks of stuff that are mostly inert. I mean, there's stuff going on in the center of the earth, but it's not burning itself. It's not consuming itself.

So, like, stars have a lifespan because they are burning their fuel and eventually they can't manage that anymore and they collapse. Right? The fire from the fusion is sustaining them. But we're not really burning anything here on Earth and Jupiter isn't burning anything. It's just a lump of stuff in space and they can do that basically forever. Lump of gas. Yeah. Like if you just have a blob of gas, it can just be a blob of gas forever.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the Earth has an uncertain future because we're so close to the sun that when the sun evolves and becomes a red giant, it's going to become much, much larger. In the end stages of its life, it's going to grow. And eventually the Earth will be inside the sun, like the sun will grow so large that where we are currently will be inside the radius of the sun. But for Jupiter. But Jupiter, it's much further away. It's got a good spot. So they're not going to be consumed by the sun.

or maybe even affected by it. Yeah, when the sun goes red giant and absorbs the earth, Jupiter will be fine out there. I mean, the radiation from the sun will increase, the heat from the sun will increase. And so that will increase the amount of solar radiation that lands on Jupiter. So it might get more violent storms on its surface.

It might affect that red spot. It might heat it up a little bit. But it's not going to be a big change for Jupiter. So Jupiter is in a pretty good spot. It's happy to sit there forever and not really do anything. Sounds like we're going to have to move to Jupiter. in a few billion years. I wouldn't recommend it.

Jupiter's not that great a place to land as the Galileo probe discovered. But maybe one of the moons of Jupiter, right? They're saying we could potentially live in one of them. There's water maybe in some of them. Yeah, there's lots of moons of Jupiter that we think might already have life. We did some fun podcast episodes about what's happening in the potential underground oceans on some of those frozen moons. Some of them have like a thick layer of ice with water. underneath and so that could be a nice place to live absolutely yeah there's a big ball

of ice and water out there just waiting for us yeah assuming the aliens don't come and turn jupiter into a star but they can't they would have to add and grow it by a hundred they would have to grow it by a hundred yeah exactly so they'd have to steal all that mass from our sun so i don't know what the aliens were thinking in 2010 well i wonder if the future jupiter juvenile astronomers are then going to be laughing at our astronomers just like we were just laughing at the dinosaur astronomers saying, man, they should have seen the sun, I should have known that the sun was going to turn to a red giant and gone it out of the way. Yeah, well, that's going to be in like a billion years.

And so I hope that we're still doing astronomy in a billion years and that we have those kind of things to think about and to worry about. But I also hope that in a billion years, we've gotten off the planet. And we have our Jovian moon colonies and astronomy happening in the outer reaches of the solar system and maybe even develop warp drives to go to other solar systems. Yeah, I guess that's the way you could do it. You could build a wormhole that connects Jupiter and the sun to sort of shunt material from the sun directly into Jupiter.

There you go. Oh, no. Now we spark the imagination of a physicist. What's the worst that can happen if we create a wormhole that connects Jupiter and the sun? Yeah, exactly. Well, fortunately, I don't know any engineers willing to actually build this thing for me. So I'm free to speculate wildly.

Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. We'll all make a pack, all of us engineers, will make a pact not to help any physicists do any kind of crazy stuff. Don't answer emails from Daniel, even if they seem like a good idea. Yeah, even if he has money, don't hit reply. All right, well, it sounds like a lot of the people who maybe were worried that Jupiter was going to turn into a star can rest easy because it doesn't sound like Jupiter is going to be a star anytime soon or can't even become a star anytime soon or maybe ever.

That's right. even though Jupiter totally dwarfs us, it's really small compared to the thresholds necessary to become even the dimmest, lamest kind of star. And it's much, much smaller than those cosmic giants that are out there fusing and illuminating the cosmos. And so while there is a lot of drama out there in the universe, stars collapsing and forming and all sorts of crazy things happening, it seems like Jupiter is pretty solid. So rest easy and relax because Jupiter is just going to keep on floating out there,

keeping its big red eye on us. That's right. And we recommend you invest in Jovian Moon real estate. Can you, is that listed on Redfin? Send me a check and I will send you a title. All right. To your new property on the Jobian Moon.

Sounds like you could get arrested for that, Daniel. But, all right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. And thanks for sending in your questions. If you'd like a question answered on the podcast, please send it to us to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

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Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looked. for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.

Thank you.