They don’t call Jupiter the “king of the planets” for nothing. It is massive, very heavy, and now scientists believe it ate pieces of other planets to make it as big as it is.
That’s right, the gas giant named after the Greek and Roman gods is believed to have absorbed a number of small “planetesimals” along the way to claim its place as the largest planet in the solar system.
The theory comes from an international team of astronomers led by Yamila Miguel of the Dutch Space Research Institute SRON and is set out in an article in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
It follows last year’s news that NASA scientists are baffled by the discovery that the planet’s Great Red Spot is accelerating.
When NASA’s Juno space mission arrived on Jupiter in 2016, scientists spotted the remarkable beauty of the fifth planet from the sun.
In addition to the famous Great Red Spot, Jupiter turns out to be full of hurricanes, almost giving it the look and mystique of a Van Gogh painting.
But what was under the outer layer was not immediately clear.
However, Juno was able to measure variations in gravitational attraction above different places on the planet’s surface, giving astronomers information about what was below.
What they found was not a homogeneous and well-mixed composition, but a higher concentration of “metals” – elements heavier than hydrogen and helium – toward the center of the planet.
The team of astronomers says the most likely explanation is that Jupiter absorbed a number of “planetesimals,” growing larger.
Planetimals are part of a class of bodies believed to have merged to form the Earth and other planets after condensing from concentrations of diffuse matter at the beginning of the history of the solar system.