The latest news from our solar system evokes memories of the Hungry Hippos game.
A new paper published this month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics says that the planet Jupiter may have become so large in part, in a sense, by swallowing smaller nearby planets.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft was able to gather new data on the monster planet when Jupiter’s famous huge gas clouds temporarily parted and the space mission was able to peek inside its core.
Read more: The rover notices shiny human garbage on the red planet
According to the returned chemical composition, astronomers believe that hungry Jupiter may have swallowed numerous “planetesimals” or baby planets in the distant past.
The latest discoveries highlight what Jupiter’s monster really is. The planet is more than 300 times larger than ours and has twice the force of Earth’s gravity. There is also the Big Red Spot – a storm that has been raging for at least 150 years, reports Space magazine, but probably much longer.
Jupiter was not only “one of the first planets to form in our solar system,” but also “the most influential planet in the formation of the solar system,” Jamila Miguel, a Dutch astrophysicist who led the study, told Live Science.
The beauty of the gas giants. 🤩 The largest planets in our solar system! Which includes: Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune! #astronomy #NASA #nasasocial #Space #UNIVERSE #physics pic.twitter.com/n3EbCN0Niz
– Astronomy Hub (@AstronomHub) June 24, 2022
Prior to this study, astrophysicists debated whether Jupiter was formed by eating other planets or by attracting other space debris with its incredible gravitational pull.
Now this team of researchers believes they may have solved the mystery.
Read more: James Webb’s telescope sends more amazing images of a distant galaxy
These findings also suggest that other gas giants in the solar system, such as Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, may also be of planetesimal origin.
Earthlings are likely to learn much more about Jupiter – also known as the “Gas Giant” – in the coming years, as the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope directs one of its giant golden mirrors to the planet as one of its 13 early target missions.
“In the first year of scientific operations, we expect the Web to write entirely new chapters in the history of our origins – the formation of stars and planets,” said Klaus Pontopidan, a scientist in the Web Space Telescope Institute’s Web project, in a recent NASA publication. blog post.
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