This is a bit of a weird thing. well very weird im talking about setting jupiter on fire.

If you look at radio images of jupiter its quite plain to see that it emits EM in infrared, this is cause of the friction of it constantly trying to contract. If jupiter had a 92% atmosphere of hydrogen instead of 90% it would have started fusion and we would be living in a binary star system.

I just had the idea when reading an astronomy book but the increase in jupiters mass (in hydrogen) would cause it to start fusion and become a star.

Sun Earth - 93 million miles
Sun Mars - 129 million miles
Sun Jupitar - 458 million miles
Earth Mars - 36 million miles
Earth Jupiter - 365 million miles
Mars Jupiter - 329 million miles

These are the rough distances between the heavenly bodys. Jupiters moons would be destroyed or just melted which isn't too much of a loss when you think about setting a planet on fire But the better point is it'd increase the solar systems luminosity. Mars would get a heat bonus but my idea for a more useful jupiter would be solar power, or using it as a star base, you drag asteroids from the belt inbetween mars and jupiter, position them a safe distance away and put them in orbit. Each one could be used as a colony and giant hydroponic stations could be used to grow food to feed the colonys and solar cells to power them.

I know its a far out idea but im thinking hundreds of years in the future when we have better space flight technology. Just wish i was alive to see the day they turn jupiter into a hypermassive firework.

Another crazy idea brought to you by EMP corp

Actually, Jupiter isn't massive enough to become a star, not a by a long shot.

To turn it into a star, you'd have to add mass equivalent to at least ten more Jupiters, IIRC...

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Jupiter would need to have 75 times it's current mass to become a star.

Besides if Jupiter were a star, it would cut down drastically on the amount of time each year amature astronomers would get to observe. It would be a pain for professional ones too. No way.

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your talking about a STAR were talking about a gas giant with a solid core that is bigger then the earth it has alot more gravity then a ball of hydrogen its size would. jupiters temperature is of its own and not because of the sun, the friction of the winds in jupiters gas cloud heats it up and these winds are formed because of the contraction of the gas.

if it was a gas formation yes it would take alot more hydrogen to turn it into a star but this is not a gas formation it is a planet under high copression and emits radio waves in the infrared range which is heat, our bodys emit it from the chemical reactions that take place in every cell. it wouldnt take too much mass to turn it into a star, we have several other gas giants the closest being saturn which is also made up of primarily hydrogen and is thought to have liquid hydrogen surrounding its core along with uranus which is also made up of mostly hydrogen.

The mass increase of jupiter would attract its moons into it giving it more mass which would help fire up the fusion prosses.

First off, if something is in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum it's not a radio wave, it's an infrared wave.

Yes, it would take that much more mass to turn it into a star, it would take 75 times it's current mass. If you threw every bit of material aside from the sun in the solar system into Jupiter it would still not have enought mass to become a star. There's a source I listed in my last post if you don't believe me.

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IIRC, Jupiter has more mass than all of the stuff in the solar system combined, including the comets, other planets, and asteroids. (excluding the sun of course.)

Yep, the other three gas giants combined are only near half Jupiter's mass IIRC.

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No vote, since your choices

Blow jupiter up?
Yes, could be fun!
No, it could wreak havock on the solar system
Dont care, we'll all be dead by then

don't include transformation into a star. Instead they concern the destruction of the planet by unknown means. Could this have been inspired by the Galileo extraurban legend? :roll:

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0.08 is what it would take to turn jupiter into a red dwarf which is what our sun will eventualy turn into im talking about turning it into a brown dwarf which would burn for hundreds of years maybe thousands, when its finished it would turn into a black dwarf which is a frozen star. your all thinking of a main system star, im talking about just burning jupiters hydrogen off in a fusion reaction.

Anyway have any of you tryed turning a planet into a star yet?
i'm guessing no so i guess you don't know if it can be done.

It takes a certain amount of mass to generate enough gravitational attraction to overcome pressure caused by increasing temperature of the collapsing hydrogen. Only then can fusion take place, and this is the mass that everyone is quoting.

A red dwarf is a low-mass main sequence star that burns hydrogen at its core. The sun will evolve into a Red Giant and eventually to a white dwarf. A white dwarf is the dead cinder shining by the remnant heat from previous fusion.

No one is saying that it isn't theoretically possible, but practically it isn't.

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My mistake on the sun turning into a red dwarf but when it turns into a red giant no one will be watching from earth. IIRC it will expand to about half the distance inbetween earth and venus and the solar winds it will create will blow the atmospheres off all the planets along with all of the earths oceans which will be boiled... sounds like the summer that years gonna be a hot one

Are you even paying attention to what is being said? Jupiter does not have enough mass to start fusion, let alone maintain it. It will never have enough mass to even start basic fusion, since you need 75~x more mass on the planet. All of the other planets combined with Jupiter would not even come fractionally close. Nice thought, but it's not going to happen.

That being said, Jupiter is still a mighty planet. 8) Actually, from what I know (this might be wrong), when Jupiter and the other gas giants were forming, they were hundreds to thousands of times brighter than they are now because of gravitational energy released from contraction.

I, for one, am all for blowing up Jupiter. That big oaf has been revolving around like it's cock of the walk for too long.

Would increasing the enrichment of the fuel really reduce the critical mass requirements by that much?

Jupiter is already mostly hydrogen, enrichment wouldn't bring it any closer to ignition.

Enriching the gas purity would help to increase the chance of fusion, introducing more pure iron into jupiters core would increase the magnetic field drasticly. (fusion would be started by the magnetic field which surrounds all 60 of its moons IIRC) Jupiters magnetic field is already like a giant magnetic bottle, this acts with relative ease on hydrogen atoms and because of the intensity of the field forces the atoms to contract more then its gravity can. Introducing iron would increase the magnetic field by a large amount.

Jupiters mass may not be enough to start fusion but its compesition may be, everyone so far is only taking mass into acount well my physics teachers been to a fusion laboratory which was under a university and im sorry but it wasn't the size of the sun under there.

emp:
Jupiter already has a very large and very powerful magnetic field: adding iron would probably not significantly improve it, as it is primarily due, if I remember the models correctly, to metallic hydrogen. And how would extra magnetism improve the chances for fusion? Fusion is driven by high temperatures and pressures driving more and more energetic collisions, which cause some fusion which releases neutrons which leads to self sustaining fusion reactions. Jupiter just does not have enough mass to do this.

"Enriching" the fuel would not help. If you have a drop of gas in your tank, it doesn't matter what the octane is: car will not go. Not enough fuel, not a matter of quality.

And we´d all go insane when night fell...

Added: it´s interesting that in an astronomy forum most people - who supposedly should appreciate dark skies - want to see Jupiter light up!

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Well speaking for the 50% :P i think it would seriously increase our understanding of the cosmos of how start can form.

okay thats the justification really it would just be really cool to turn a planet into a star and well you just dont look directly at jupiter if you want to star gaze, anyway alot of the time jupiter will be at the opposing side of the sun to us.

Yes, maybe two or three months a year.

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for only about 1/4 of the year would jupiter actualy be on the dark side of the earth so it wouldnt be too drastic anyway it wouldnt be as bright as the sun is especialy over the much larger distance.

You´d better check your figures. Jupiter-star doesn´t have to be exactly at the "dark side" (in opposition) to wreak havoc on astronomical observations. Even when the angle between Jupiter and the Sun was 90 deg, Jupiter would be at noon when Sol was setting. Thus, the night (for an observer located at the Equator) would last only 6 hours. And a Jupiter-star would only have to be as bright as the full Moon to mess up our observations. Sixty per cent of the year the nights would last less than 6 hours.

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I cant vote on this one, there are much more practical scifi things to do to Jupiter.

The best one that comes to mind is the world moving ship detailed in Man out of Time by Lary Niven, although I think he used Neptune. Then we could use it to dump the other gas giants into the sun, and get a few million more years of fusion energy out of that.

I wanna know what laboratory this fellah's teacher worked at where they've made a sustaining fusion reaction chamber...

=D> World Energy Problems Are At An End Boys! =D>

No, wait... you'd think I'd have heard something about that... somewhere... like on CNN or FoxNews in the mornings...

Nevermind... False alarm... :wink:

[Edit To Add]

http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...allileo#136054

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If we in the future manage to increase jupiters mass to the minimum requirements for it to ignite how bright would it be seen from the earth?

I guestimate it wouldn´t be brighter than the Sun as seen from Pluto (Jupiter is roughly 4 times further from us than the Sun). With the minimum requirement to be a star it would emmit most of its energy in the infra-red wavelengths. Still it would be bright enough in the visible spectrum to fill the sky with an annoying (from an astronomer point of view) glow.

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i never said sustaining but they have managed to make fusion last long enough to give a small city of about 50,000 peoples power needs for an hour.

Oh and as for your CNN did you know that theirs light bulbs that never burn out and they even have light bulbs that only emit light now.
Erm what else, mass drivers that could fire things to mars in about 2 days, all the discoverys aren't reported because alot of people just dont care.

Let's see, brightness is an inverse-square relationship so at the closest point Earth is to Jupiter it would be about 1/16th as bright as the Sun, but that doesn't factor in the decreased luminosity it would have in the visible spectrum (I'm assuming Argos is right) so to us it would be even fainter.