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Space Telescope Science Institute
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Was Jupiter once a star ?
Imagine for a moment that you are omniscient. You can see the universe as it evolves, or you can go back to "the beginning" and see worlds as they are born, in minutae. Suppose you were to step back in time, say twelve billion years - about when our sun was hatching. What did it look like ? Is it what astronomers from the twentieth century envision, or was it different ? When el Sol reached main sequence, were its emissions as we observe them now or were they emissions of a totally different type of star ?
These are a few of the questions I hope to address in this paper, and a few others besides. These questions started me in my quest for information and "truth" about how our solar system developed. It was not, and still is not, an easy task. First let me whet your appetite for the unusual.
Jupiter is a major planetary body, gaseous and gigantic - all Jupiter needed to become a star (at least as we now understand star development) was one hundred times more mass. Now go back twelve billion years and imagine a tug-of-war between el Sol and Jupiter over the available material in what was then a miasma of gas and dust. Could there have been enough materials to allow both el Sol and Jupiter to have become a compact binary stellar system ?
We know that binary systems are far more prevalent than unary star systems, so why would it be impossible for Jupiter and el Sol to be such a system when they first came into existence ? This leads us to another premise, and another question. If the Jupiter-el Sol binary system followed observed patterns, there was a very large primary star and a much smaller companion star. Which was which ?
Let's assume for sanity's sake that el Sol won the battle an accrued the bulk of the free matter available to this developing system. It became a type-O,B, or A star, and Jupiter became a type-K star or other more "metallic" star. If el Sol was one of these more short lived stars, it may have exploded at some point and spread the materials that we now observe to be planets around our solar system. Jupiter would have been extinguished within hours and its available materials added to the maelstrom for redistribution.
(To be continued...)
If you have comments or
constructive criticism, e-mail me at: 
Webslave
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