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Jupiter Was Formerly Twice Its Current Size and Had a Much Stronger Magnetic Field
(www.caltech.edu)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I guess it still doesn't meet the necessary mass for being a failed star?
Considering it would have to be an order of magnitude larger just to fuse deuterium? No. The smallest brown dwarfs are 13x Jupiter's mass. And this article describes only a change in Jupiter's size, not its mass.
The article doesn't say it (it actually doesn't explain anything very well), but the implication to me seems to be that Jupiter was much hotter in the past, shrinking (and becoming less magnetically active) as it cooled?
I imagine this has implications for aging gas giants. What will Jupiter be like in a billion years?
Older?