Jupiter (planet)

• might capture outer planets, become a sun

15:5.86. Con­trac­tural Stars. In the smaller sys­tems the largest outer planet some­times draws to it­self its neigh­bor­ing worlds, while those plan­ets near the sun be­gin their ter­mi­nal plunge. With your so­lar sys­tem, such an end would mean that the four in­ner plan­ets would be claimed by the sun, while the ma­jor planet, Jupiter, would be greatly en­larged by cap­tur­ing the re­main­ing worlds. Such an end of a so­lar sys­tem would re­sult in the pro­duc­tion of two ad­ja­cent but un­equal suns, one type of dou­ble star for­ma­tion. Such catas­tro­phes are in­fre­quent ex­cept out on the fringe of the super­uni­verse starry ag­gre­ga­tions.

• origin

41:10.1Some of the vari­able stars, in or near the state of max­i­mum pul­sa­tion, are in pro­cess of giv­ing ori­gin to sub­sidiary sys­tems, many of which will even­tu­ally be much like your own sun and its re­volv­ing plan­ets. Your sun was in just such a state of mighty pul­sa­tion when the mas­sive An­gona sys­tem swung into near ap­proach, and the outer sur­face of the sun be­gan to erupt ver­i­ta­ble streams—con­tin­u­ous sheets—of mat­ter. This kept up with ever-in­creas­ing vi­o­lence un­til near­est ap­po­si­tion, when the lim­its of so­lar co­he­sion were reached and a vast pin­na­cle of mat­ter, the an­ces­tor of the so­lar sys­tem, was dis­gorged. In sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances the clos­est ap­proach of the at­tract­ing body some­times draws off whole plan­ets, even a quar­ter or third of a sun. These ma­jor ex­tru­sions form cer­tain pe­cu­liar cloud-bound types of worlds, spheres much like Jupiter and Sat­urn.

• origin
• retrograde motion of certain satellites

57:5.9The five in­ner and five outer plan­ets soon formed in minia­ture from the cool­ing and con­dens­ing nu­cle­uses in the less mas­sive and ta­per­ing ends of the gi­gan­tic grav­ity bulge which An­gona had suc­ceeded in de­tach­ing from the sun, while Sat­urn and Jupiter were formed from the more mas­sive and bulging cen­tral por­tions. The pow­er­ful grav­ity pull of Jupiter and Sat­urn early cap­tured most of the ma­te­rial stolen from An­gona as the ret­ro­grade mo­tion of cer­tain of their satel­lites bears wit­ness.

• largely gaseous
• secondary sun for short period

57:5.10Jupiter and Sat­urn, be­ing de­rived from the very cen­ter of the enor­mous col­umn of super­heated so­lar gases, con­tained so much highly heated sun ma­te­rial that they shone with a bril­liant light and emit­ted enor­mous vol­umes of heat; they were in re­al­ity sec­ondary suns for a short pe­riod af­ter their for­ma­tion as sep­a­rate space bod­ies. These two largest of the so­lar sys­tem plan­ets have re­mained largely gaseous to this day, not even yet hav­ing cooled off to the point of com­plete con­den­sa­tion or so­lid­i­fi­ca­tion.

• one moon near tidal disruption

57:6.5Shoot­ing stars oc­cur in swarms be­cause they are the frag­ments of larger bod­ies of mat­ter which have been dis­rupted by tidal grav­ity ex­erted by near-by and still larger space bod­ies. Sat­urn’s rings are the frag­ments of a dis­rupted satel­lite. One of the moons of Jupiter is now ap­proach­ing dan­ger­ously near the crit­i­cal zone of tidal dis­rup­tion and, within a few mil­lion years, will ei­ther be claimed by the planet or will un­dergo grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion. The fifth planet of the so­lar sys­tem of long, long ago tra­versed an ir­reg­u­lar or­bit, pe­ri­od­i­cally mak­ing closer and closer ap­proach to Jupiter un­til it en­tered the crit­i­cal zone of grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion, was swiftly frag­men­tized, and be­came the pres­ent-day clus­ter of as­ter­oids.