Jovian Planets essays

Jovian Planets essays The view on how astronomers once thought that the planets in universe formed is beginning to change. Astronomers once thought the guest giant plants formed slowly. Gravity pulled debris together to form rocky cores several times a mass of the Earth, the largest of these sweeping up vast amounts of gas becoming huge giants. It is thought that roughly one billion years was needed to make these planets by the core-accretion process. Recent computer modeling in discoveries of extra solar planets suggest differently. Recent discoveries in modeling suggest that Jupiter size planets are lucky survivors of a much faster process. Survival is almost rare as these would be Jupiter's and Saturn's have only a few million years to grab all they can and many Jupiter like planets either bounce out of the solar system or plunge into the parents sons because of complex gravitational interactions. The startling shift in thinking began when Lawrence Livermore national laboratory physicist Bill Nellis fired a laser beam at a quarter size disk of liquid hydrogen. This laser crunch created metallic hydrogen, which is believed to fill the cores of the giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn. Nellis's computer model results are "consistent with a rocky core mass of zero" says scientist Bill Hubbard. With no or a little rocky core, core-accretion is difficult to explain. Carne institution of Washington astrophysicist Alan Boss suggest Jupiter may have formed with a clump of gas collapsed under its own weight, similar to store formation. Ts disk instability model is actually updated version of the 29-year-old theory. This theory, created in 1951 by Gerard Kuiper, and refined by Al Cameron in 1970, suggested gas in a merely uniformed disk would abruptly become unstable and contract rapidly compressing into clumps forming spheres. "The disk-instability model fell into complete disrepute," says Boss as no one could reconcile rocky cores with a collapsing ...