NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter is revealing the gas giant's secrets. A new study shows that Jupiter grew by eating planetesimals.
We’re growing accustomed to gorgeous images of Jupiter thanks to the Juno spacecraft’s. But what we see is only skin deep. All those spellbinding images of the clouds and storms are only the thin 50 km outermost layer of the planet’s atmosphere. The key to Jupiter’s formation and evolution is deeply buried in the planet’s atmosphere, which is tens of thousands of kilometres deep.
The researchers found that Jupiter’s atmosphere isn’t as homogenous as previously thought. More metals are near the planet’s center than in the other layers. Altogether, the metals add up to between 11 and 30 Earth masses. The researchers created two contrasting types of models of Jupiter. The 3-layer models contain more distinct regions, with an inner core of metals, a mid-region dominated by metallic hydrogen, and an outer layer dominated by molecular hydrogen In the dilute core models, the inner core’s metals are mixed into the middle region, resulting in a dilute core.
“We robustly demonstrate that the heavy element abundance is not homogeneous in Jupiter’s envelope,” the authors write in their paper. “Our results imply that Jupiter continued to accrete heavy elements in large amounts while its hydrogen-helium envelope was growing, contrary to predictions based on the pebble-isolation mass in its simplest incarnation, favouring instead planetesimal-based or more complex hybrid models.
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