Two Suns

[Hermiod]

Just been reading Deckerd's thread here and thought of another question.

What would be the effect on Earth if the events of 2010: Odyssey Two came true and Jupiter was converted to a second star ?

What effects would it really have on Jupiter's moons ? In the book's epilogue, by 20,001 humans have colonised Io, Ganymede and Callisto but Europa remains off limits because a monolith continues to prevent humans from intefering from the developing alien civilisation there.

 

[Deckerd]

I know this is off topic but your question just reminded me of that amazing scene from Pitch Black, when the survivors realised there was a third sun.

 

[Hermiod]

I know this is off topic but your question just reminded me of that amazing scene from Pitch Black, when the survivors realised there was a third sun.

That was a cool scene. Not quite as cool as when they realise there's about to be an eclipse and how utterly boned they are.

 

[DRMidnite]

I know this is off topic but your question just reminded me of that amazing scene from Pitch Black, when the survivors realised there was a third sun.

That was a cool scene. Not quite as cool as when they realise there's about to be an eclipse and how utterly boned they are.

Boned doesn't even start to cover it!

 

[All Seeing Eye]

What would be the effect on Earth if the events of 2010: Odyssey Two came true and Jupiter was converted to a second star ?

It would bring about a whole new meaning for the term 'Global Warming'.

 

[Hermiod]

What would be the effect on Earth if the events of 2010: Odyssey Two came true and Jupiter was converted to a second star ?

It would bring about a whole new meaning for the term 'Global Warming'.

On Jupiter's moons, sure, but would it have that much of an effect on Earth ?

 

[Neopeius]

What would be the effect on Earth if the events of 2010: Odyssey Two came true and Jupiter was converted to a second star ?

It would bring about a whole new meaning for the term 'Global Warming'.

Jupiter turned into a pretty small star. The point was to warm Europa up to inhabitable temperatures (I presume ~0 degrees C).

Jupiter* would only need 1/50000 the luminosity of the sun for that which is really on the bottom edge of being a star.

At 1/50000 Solar L, you have an apparent brightness which varies from .00000125 that of the sun to .00000056 that of the sun depending on where the Earth is.

So Jupiter* is 15 magnitudes dimmer than the sun at its brightest, 16 at its dimmest. The sun has an apparent magnitude of around -27. So Jupiter* will have a magnitude of -12 at best. This is almost the exact same brightness as the full moon.

So when the sun and Jupiter* are on opposite sides of the Earth, inhabitants will have a lovely red dot in the sky (no disk easily discernible) as bright as the full moon. When the sun and Jupiter* are close, the new star will be a point visible in the daytime, as bright as a quarter moon, but largely drowned out by the sun's rays.

I would expect no other effects on the Earth although the infusion of mass into Jupiter* might perturb some cometary orbits with.. interesting results.

 

[Rÿcher]

Wasn't (isn't) there a theory that our sun has a brown dwarf companion that we can't see called Nemesis or something ominous like that?

 

[Neopeius]

Wasn't (isn't) there a theory that our sun has a brown dwarf companion that we can't see called Nemesis or something ominous like that?

Yes, to explain the apparent 26 million year extinction cycle. The dwarf would scatter comets in the Oort Cloud causing one or more to hit the Earth. It's completely hypothetical at this point.

 

[USS Excelsior]

But Jupiter would have to acquire at least 50x the mass for stellar ignition, and the smallest true star would be a red dwarf which is many times larger than Jupiter.

That would mean that Jupiter's moons would have to move further away to avoid being engulfed.

Also I take it that Jupiter would still be orbiting the sun in it's current orbit.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Detonating several thousand 100 megaton nuclear warheads in the Jovian atmosphere should ignite the gas into a plasma state and cause a chain reaction turning the gas giant into a star.

 

[Neopeius]

But Jupiter would have to acquire at least 50x the mass for stellar ignition, and the smallest true star would be a red dwarf which is many times larger than Jupiter.

That would mean that Jupiter's moons would have to move further away to avoid being engulfed.

Brown dwarfs and the smallest red dwarfs aren't going to have much more volume than Jupiter. They will have more mass, though, as you've observed.

I'm sure that would play hell with orbits of the Jovian moons, but we could hand wave that away and say their periods just get shorter.. right?

 

[Hermiod]

Just for the record, in the book (and the movie), no additional mass is added with the exception of a very large number of monoliths which appear out of nowhere. It is not clear whether or not the monoliths contributed to the overall mass of the new star, named Lucifer.

The novel is decidedly vague on the actual mechanism used to collapse Jupiter in to a star.

 

[Neopeius]

Just for the record, in the book (and the movie), no additional mass is added with the exception of a very large number of monoliths which appear out of nowhere. It is not clear whether or not the monoliths contributed to the overall mass of the new star, named Lucifer.

The novel is decidedly vague on the actual mechanism used to collapse Jupiter in to a star.

Then my calcs should be right on since I just figured the appropriate luminosity without worrying about pesky things like mass...

 

[Silvercrest]

Detonating several thousand 100 megaton nuclear warheads in the Jovian atmosphere should ignite the gas into a plasma state and cause a chain reaction turning the gas giant into a star.

This sounds like something out of a Star Trek episode, not real physics. Can anyone confirm what would happen?

 

[FordSVT]

Detonating several thousand 100 megaton nuclear warheads in the Jovian atmosphere should ignite the gas into a plasma state and cause a chain reaction turning the gas giant into a star.

This sounds like something out of a Star Trek episode, not real physics. Can anyone confirm what would happen?

I can conform that Tachy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Thousands of nukes going off in the atmosphere wouldn't do shit besides make some pretty lights. Jupiter is gigantic; you need mass to start fusion, not just a bunch of nuclear fire crackers going off. You could set the entire planet on fire and it wouldn't create a self-sustaining fusion.

Remember that comet, Shoemaker-Levy?

"Over the next 6 days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal)."

"Only" punch a few holes the size of Earth in her and spewed gas thousands of miles into space, and that's about it.

I'm pretty sure you could smack ALL of the other planets in the solar system into Jupiter and you'd still have only a fraction of the mass you'd need to ignite a sun. Talk of Jupiter being "almost big enough to be a sun" or a "failed sun" are overstating things. Not only are the calculations of such things relatively well known, there are now many observed planets many times larger than Jupiter.

 

[Canadave]

Just for the record, in the book (and the movie), no additional mass is added with the exception of a very large number of monoliths which appear out of nowhere. It is not clear whether or not the monoliths contributed to the overall mass of the new star, named Lucifer.

The novel is decidedly vague on the actual mechanism used to collapse Jupiter in to a star.

As I recall, there was some handwaving revolving around the fact that the monolith aliens are really advanced and can basically do whatever they want.

 

[JGordon]

My understanding of the novel (though it has been a long time), was that no additional mass was added to Jupiter, the monoliths just compressed jupiter enough that fusion began due to the incredibly high pressures (and thus high heat). Normally these pressures require far more mass than Jupiter has, but the monoliths bypassed that by turning on god mode.

 

[Silvercrest]

Detonating several thousand 100 megaton nuclear warheads in the Jovian atmosphere should ignite the gas into a plasma state and cause a chain reaction turning the gas giant into a star.

This sounds like something out of a Star Trek episode, not real physics. Can anyone confirm what would happen?

I can conform that Tachy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Thousands of nukes going off in the atmosphere wouldn't do shit besides make some pretty lights. Jupiter is gigantic; you need mass to start fusion, not just a bunch of nuclear fire crackers going off. You could set the entire planet on fire and it wouldn't create a self-sustaining fusion.

Thanks, that was about what I thought.

 

[Hermiod]

^That's what the monoliths do, they draw all of Jupiter's mass in rather than exploding it outwards.