Straight Up

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After five years traveling through space to its destination, our Juno spacecraft will arrive in orbit around Jupiter today, July 4, 2016. This video shows a peek of what the spacecraft saw as it closed in on its destination before instruments were turned off. Watch our noon EDT Pre-Orbit Insertion Briefing on NASA Television for more: https://www.nasa.gov/nasatv or http://youtube.com/nasajpl/live. 

Star Wars Planets

Known distances of stars from Earth in the 1890s, chart and table. The story of the sun, moon and stars. 1898.

My favourite scenes from the Harry Potter movies

Harry can be so sassy

Why…

Our Solar System!

A Denied stardom status - Jupiter

Of all the planets in our solar system, Jupiter seems to stand out as this massive giants.

When scientists started uncovering the secrets of this mysterious planet, they discovered that Jupiter was probably a ‘star in the making’ during the early years of the solar system.

Jupiter and the sun

Jupiter has a lot in common with the sun than you think.

It is made of the same elements such as Hydrogen and Helium that are found in the sun and other stars!

But it is not massive enough and does not have have the pressure and temperature to fuse the existing Hydrogen atoms to form helium, which is the power source of stars.

How do stars form ?

Stars form directly from the collapse of dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Because of rotation, these clouds form flattened disks that surround the central, growing stars.

After the star has nearly reached its final mass, by accreting gas from the disk, the leftover matter in the disk is free to form planets. 

How was Jupiter formed ?

Jupiter is generally believed to have formed in a two-step process:

First, a vast swarm of ice and rock ‘planetesimals’ formed. These comet-sized bodies collided and accumulated into ever-larger planetary embryos.

Once an embryo became about as massive as ten Earths, its self-gravity became strong enough to pull in gas directly from the disk. 

During this second step, the proto-Jupiter gained most of its present mass (a total of 318 times the mass of the Earth).

But sadly soon thereafter, the disk gas was removed by the intense early solar wind (from our sun) , before Jupiter could grow to a similar size.

This destroyed all hopes that Jupiter had on becoming a star

What if it had become a star ?

If Jupiter had become a star,our solar system would have become a binary star system.

A binary star system is those systems having two stars.they both revolve around themselves in their own orbits.

It is interesting to note that most of the solar systems in the universe are binary,triple or higher multiple star systems but our sun is rather unusual.

In other star systems the mass distribution of the stars is equitable, but in ours the sun decided to not let that happen

Why? We have no clue ! Scientists are still trying to fathom these mysterious details of the birth process. But the more we know, the more we learn we don’t know :D

Rings and Moons Circling Uranus, taken by Hubble space telescope.

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