What happens if you ignite Jupiter?

[Bluesteel]

I got this idea from Stargate and I have been thinking about. Carter and some evil boring aliens were planning on igniting Jupiter.

Lets ignore the How and focus on the What.

What would actually happen if Jupiter was turned into a minisun that would run out of fuel in 500,000.

 

[O'Dib]

You can live on its moons?

 

[Lindley]

Conditions on the moons would certainly change. Hard to predict to what degree. The gravity would presumably remain the same, but the radius of Jupiter would presumably need to decrease in order to generate the heat required for fusion.

 

[John Picard]

We could invite the world to the largest weenie roast.

 

[Bluesteel]

I was thinking basically if it was a good way of heating Mars,Pluto,Sedna,Asteroid belts and the moons of the other Gas planets.

But then I kept thinking. If Jupiter uses it's mass has fuel. It's gravity will decrease and comets will sneak past. Bah so much for my great idea.

 

[Trekker4747]

Repeat this to yourself very slowly as many times as it takes:

"The sun is not on fire. It is simply "firely looking" in the loosest sense of the term."

The sun's great mass and heat takes two hydrogen atoms and smashes them together until they have no other choice but to combine with one another and form helium. The left over "stuff" gets ejected out as various forms of radiation.

Jupiter is made mostly of hyrdogen, so first of all you couldn't "ignite" it because there's no oxygen for the H2 to burn. But let's say there was and you could. Jupiter would go *WOOF* and quickly burn out like the Hindenberg did. Sure it may "burn" for a while since there's a great deal of Hydrogen there but not for any ammount of time to be of any real use though it may cause some detriment to life on Earth, although heat doesn't translate well in a vacuum and radiant heat, well, kinda sucks.

So what would happen if we could ignite Jupiter? Not a whole heck of a lot.

 

[Lindley]

Of all the obstacles to terraforming, heat really isn't one of the big ones. We know how to make heaters. Atmosphere is really a much bigger deal.

 

[O'Dib]

^ ^ I think he means "ignite" in the sense of having it undergo fusion.. somehow.

 

[O'Dib]

^ ^ if you seed a moon with plantlife, which can photosynthesize due to burnin' Jove's proximity, would it not start generating an atmosphere?

 

[Trekker4747]

^ ^ I think he means "ignite" in the sense of having it undergo fusion.. somehow.

If in "ignite" in that sense... Wouldn't be a good idea. It'd be detremental to life on Earth and I doubt any of Jupiter's moons are in a "habitable zone" and would get bombarded with radiation and likely too damn hot to be livable.

 

[Lindley]

I doubt it would have much effect on Earth. The planet's pretty far away and just not that big. It'd be dimmer than the moon, I suspect.

 

[Trekker4747]

I doubt it would have much effect on Earth. The planet's pretty far away and just not that big. It'd be dimmer than the moon, I suspect.

It's hard to say, maybe.

I suspect, though, it'd offer any real benifit.

 

[Christopher]

I got this idea from Stargate and I have been thinking about. Carter and some evil boring aliens were planning on igniting Jupiter.

That happened in the episode "2010," and was an homage to Arthur C. Clarke's novel and film 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The climax of 2010 revealed that the monoliths were self-replicating machines whose purpose was to cause Jupiter to collapse to sufficient density to undergo fusion and become a miniature sun. What happened was that Jupiter's moon Europa became warmer and habitable on the surface so that the life in its subglacial oceans could be free to evolve further.

However, I'm not sure that would happen, since the crust and mantle of most of the Galilean satellites is pretty much pure ice. So if the ice were melted, they'd become water worlds completely covered in deep ocean without a speck of land, which wouldn't necessarily be any more conducive to life than an iced-over ocean. (On Earth, most oceanic life needs runoff of nutrients from the land in order to survive. A region of ocean without the influx of sediments is just as much a desert as a region of land without the influx of water.)

As for the effect on Earth, it would be fairly minor, due to the distance and small size of the pseudo-star. Again, the novel 2010 discusses what the consequences of this would be, so that's where you want to go for your answers.

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

If you ignite Jupiter, it would quickly go out again. It doesn't have the mass to sustain fusion, even if the fusion somehow got started in the first place.

People often misunderstand a fusion reaction as being a naturally escalating or upward-trending reaction like the fast oxidation (combustion) reaction that we are used to, in all its forms - be they a simple slow fire in open air or some semtex/TNT/dynamite exploding. In fact, fusion reactions are very loath to occur, it takes a lot of effort to sustain the fusion. Vast temperature and compression, which must not only be present at the start, but for as long as the fusion is to continue.

In nature, when you get sufficient mass together, nuclear fusion starts automatically, due to the combination of extreme compression and temperature at the core of the mass reaching the critical point. But it requires a lot of mass, more than Jupiter has. It would take at least 13 times Jupiter's mass to sustain fusion of any kind (deuterium fusion), making a brown dwarf proto-star, and 75 - 80 Jupiters to form a "proper" main-sequence hydrogen-fusing star.

Even if you could somehow artificially cause fusion to start in Jupiter's core, the moment the artificial stimulus was removed, fusion would cease. It doesn't have the gravitational compression required.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

You can live on its moons?

All except Europa. We can't attempt any landings there.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ ^ I think he means "ignite" in the sense of having it undergo fusion.. somehow.

In 2010 Oddyssey Two they did it by dumping a crapload of degenerate matter into the core, increasing its density and compressing it under its own gravity like a fusion bomb.

2061 described Europa as having a fairly temperate climate with a thick but utterly poisonous atmosphere, a sea filled with slow-moving but voracious predators, and a few jagged landmasses where the sea level had reduced. Since Europea is tide-locked to Jupiter, the sun would always shine on one side, so the sun-facing side would be liveable and the opposite side would be a frozen wasteland (convection displaced most of the water to the opposite hemisphere, so seal level on the sun side is several hundred meters lower than the opposite side).

 

[skep155]

Im not quite sure what it would do, but any attempt to do it would send me screaming into the night like a lunatic shouting "were all deadmen you fools! were all dead!".

 

[USS KG5]

^ ^ if you seed a moon with plantlife, which can photosynthesize due to burnin' Jove's proximity, would it not start generating an atmosphere?

No because all the plants would instantly die due to the absence of an atmosphere.

 

[O'Dib]

Hm, I seem to recall watching a show about terraforming by introducing increasingly complex plant life. Beginning with something like single-celled algae (which presumably don't need atmo), then moss, and so on.

 

[USS KG5]

Hm, I seem to recall watching a show about terraforming by introducing increasingly complex plant life. Beginning with something like single-celled algae (which presumably don't need atmo), then moss, and so on.

Well they would need something, though of course algae need a lot less to live in than people. I'd expect plant life would be an important part of terraforming projects if such a thing ever happens.