The Age of Jupiter

[Area54]

There is a bunch of work being done by many scientists on the origin and early years of the solar system. An important datum is the age of Jupiter. This is because, as the largest planet in the system, it has a profound effect on the others. The presence of the asteroid belt rather than a planet at that distance is an example.

 

A team of researchers have used an interesting approach to try to define this. "using molybdenum and tungsten isotope measurements on iron meteorites, [they demonstrated] that meteorites derive from two genetically distinct nebular reservoirs that coexisted and remained spatially separated between ∼1 My and ∼3–4 My after Solar System formation."

 

They suggest the most likely cause of this partitioning was the formation of Jupiter <1 m.y. after solar system formation.

 

The research is published here. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available. I think all PNAS papers become open access after a year or eighteen months.

 

I get a little tired of the plethora of papers that model planetary system formation, prefering ones like this that deal with physical reality. (Not that the modelling isn't immensely valuable, but so is broccoli and I don't like that either.)

[beecee]

There is a bunch of work being done by many scientists on the origin and early years of the solar system. An important datum is the age of Jupiter. This is because, as the largest planet in the system, it has a profound effect on the others. The presence of the asteroid belt rather than a planet at that distance is an example.

 

A team of researchers have used an interesting approach to try to define this. "using molybdenum and tungsten isotope measurements on iron meteorites, [they demonstrated] that meteorites derive from two genetically distinct nebular reservoirs that coexisted and remained spatially separated between ∼1 My and ∼3–4 My after Solar System formation."

 

They suggest the most likely cause of this partitioning was the formation of Jupiter <1 m.y. after solar system formation.

 

The research is published here. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available. I think all PNAS papers become open access after a year or eighteen months.

 

I get a little tired of the plethora of papers that model planetary system formation, prefering ones like this that deal with physical reality. (Not that the modelling isn't immensely valuable, but so is broccoli and I don't like that either.)

 

 

 

While there is some variations for the collapsing accretion disk planetary formation model, [sometimes called the Nebular hypothesis] the basis of it appears now to be well accepted. One such variation is what is known as "planetary migration" of gas giants such as Jupiter.

From memory this hypothesis seems to have been born with the relatively large numbers of extra solar "hot Jupiters" that have been discovered.

Edited July 18, 2017 by beecee