The Netherlands – An international team of astronomers has found that Jupiter’s gaseous envelope does not have a homogeneous distribution, meaning that the gases in the planet’s crust are not uniformly distributed.
The inner part contains more minerals than the outer parts, which adds to the mass of minerals between 11 and 30 Earth masses, or 3-9% of the total mass of Jupiter.
This is a high enough percentage of the metal to conclude that objects as large as one kilometer (the minor planets) must have played a role in the formation of Jupiter.
When NASA’s Juno space mission reached Jupiter in 2016, scientists got a glimpse of the incredible beauty of the largest planet in our solar system. In addition to the famous Great Red Spot, Jupiter has been found to be riddled with hurricanes, giving it an almost glamorous appearance similar to a Van Gogh painting.
However, the planet’s atmosphere below the thin visible layer is not well visible. Juno is still able to paint a picture of us by sensing the force of gravity over various locations on Jupiter. This gives astronomers information about the composition of the interior, which is not like what we see on the surface.
An international team of astronomers, led by Yamila Miguel of the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and the Leiden Observatory, has found that the planet’s gaseous atmosphere is not as homogeneous and mixed as previously thought. Instead, it has a higher contraction of metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, toward the center of the planet.
To reach their conclusions, the team built a number of theoretical models that adhere to the observational constraints that Juno measures.
The team studied the distribution of minerals because it gives them information about how Jupiter formed. It turns out that the minerals were not uniformly distributed across the envelope, with more on the inside than on the outside.
The total is between 11 and 30 Earth masses of minerals. “There are two mechanisms for a gas giant like Jupiter to obtain minerals during its formation: through the accumulation of small pebbles or large planets,” says Miguel. And we know that once a small planet gets big enough, it starts spiking pebbles. The mineral richness within Jupiter that we see now would have been impossible to achieve before. So we can rule out the scenario using only pebbles as a solid during the formation of Jupiter. And the minor planets are too big to be banned, so they must have played a role.”
“The finding that the inner part of the atmosphere contains more heavy elements than the outer part means that abundance decreases outward with a gradient, rather than a homogeneous mixing across the atmosphere,” explains Miguel. Earlier, we thought that Jupiter has a heat transfer, like boiling water, which makes it completely mixed. But our findings show it differently.”
Source: phys.org