Jupiter devoured the minor planets to grow rapidly

NASA’s Juno probe is the first to provide a glimpse into Jupiter’s gas layers. And there were the remnants of a whole series of minor planets that had been assimilated by the giant some time ago.

The largest planet in our solar system is slow to reveal its secrets. With the usual telescopes, we can only see and analyze the clouds in the upper atmosphere – thus obscuring the view into the deep regions of the giant ball of gas. For several years, the Juno probe has been orbiting NASA Jupiter penetrates deeper with their instruments.
Juno probe on Jupiter

“Jupiter was one of the first planets to form, in the first million years when the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago,” lead researcher Yamila Miguel, an astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, explained to the US magazine Live Science. “However, we know nothing for sure about how it formed.”

The core of the buyer

So Juno measures the gravitational fields with which Jupiter interacts with other objects with great accuracy. They can also be used to determine mass concentrations in and below clouds of opaque gases. In particular, it penetrates into the core, which is already suspected to be solid – although this region filled with heavy elements is only a relatively small ball deep in the gas giant’s interior.

The Analytics However, based on the chemical composition, I point out that the cosmic dust was in no way uniformly compacted here. Instead, the structures give the impression that Jupiter accelerated its early growth by tapping and adding itself to the minor planets, the planet’s predecessors and building blocks, as well as the minor planets themselves, near its orbit. Only in this way can today’s core develop enough gravitational force to capture the vast amounts of gas that make up the current picture of the planet.

See also:

Saturn, Mars, Earth, Solar System, Planets, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury
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