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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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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.
Thanks for the explanation. So it has to be 13x of its mass to be considered as a failed star. This astonishes me, we are so insignificantly small. Hmm, can we assume it just got dense in time then?
Gas giants get denser with time. They're, by definition, mostly made of gas. And gas significantly expands or contracts based on temperature. I'm sure a terrestrial planet like Earth shrinks slightly as it's cooled from its founding, but nothing compared to a gas giant. Jupiter was much hotter earlier on. So as it cooled, it became less puffed up.
I see. Its core temperature is closer to a planet than a brown dwarf I guess. Though I have found this. Well, space is amazing.