New red spot appears on Jupiter

Astronomy Magazine website ^ | May 22, 2008 | University of California, Berkeley

[theFIRMbss]

>I wonder if jupiter has enough mass to do that?

I found this old piece
from last year. Sometimes small "stars"
can be very small . . .

----------------------------------------------------------------

'Failed star' spews jets from its poles

Phenomenon typically associated with much larger black holes

By Ker THan, Space.com

updated 7:54 p.m. CT, Mon., May. 28, 2007


A "failed star" with only 24 times the mass of Jupiter is the smallest known object to spout jets of matter from its poles, a phenomenon typically associated with much larger black holes and young stars.

The new finding, detailed in the current issue of Astrophysical Journal, confirms that a wide range of celestial objects is capable of generating such outflows.

"There are black holes that are 3 million solar masses spewing jets, and there's this thing, which is 2 percent of a solar mass, doing the same thing," said study team member Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto.

The discovery also raises the possibility that large gas giant planets like Jupiter or Saturn might also have been gushers some time early in their history.

A gushing brown dwarf

The new jet-spewing object is a previously identified brown dwarf — celestial objects with masses between 13 and 75 times that of the Jupiter, too massive to be a planet but too small to sustain the internal nuclear fires needed to become stars. For this reason, brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars.

Called 2M1207a, the spurting brown dwarf is ringed by gas and dust, similar to the protoplanetary disks from which planets form around young stars. Indeed, 2M1207a is known to harbor a 5-Jupiter-mass planetary companion. Called 2M1207b, the gas giant was one of the first planets outside of our solar system to have its picture taken directly.

2M1207a's streaming jets were discovered using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). The jets extend about 620 million miles (1 billion km) into space and are speeding away from the brown dwarf at a few kilometers per second.

"Preliminary results suggest that a brown-dwarf jet is just scaled down from what we see in a low mass star," said study leader Emma Whelan of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Physics in Ireland.

In 2005, Whelan's team discovered the first jet-spewing brown dwarf, but that one was about 60 Jupiter masses.

Jets and star formation

Scientists are still not sure of the role jets play in star formation. One idea is that by ejecting large amounts of material into space, the jets help determine the final size and mass of the star.

Another hypothesis is that jets actually play a major role in initiating star formation in the first place. Stars are thought to form from enormous, spinning clouds of gas and dust that somehow collapse and contract into blazing balls of fire. To do this, the clouds must get rid of a lot of spin energy, or "angular momentum."

"One of the best ways to get rid of that is to put it into a jet," Jayawardhana told SPACE.com. "So these jets might actually be spinning and carrying out the angular momentum of the formed object."

The new gushing nature of 2M1207a could help shed light on how jets are formed and sustained.

"The only way to test these models for launching jets is to test them at extreme examples," Jayawardhana said in a telephone interview. The mechanism has to "work for such a low-mass object, and that puts interesting constraints on what types of launching mechanisms might work."

Planetary jets?

Because 2M1207a is so small, the discovery suggests gas giant planets in our solar system and beyond could also drive outflows.

"It seems like almost any time you have accretion disk around an object, some of the material that's accreted is also spewed out," Jayawardhana said.

Both Saturn and Jupiter are thought to have grown out of accretion disks. Saturn's disk is still clearly visible in the form of its rings.

Some theorists have proposed an alternative scenario for planet formation different from the standard model in which large gas planets can form from gravitational collapse similar to stars.

If a jet-spewing gas giant were ever spotted, it would be evidence of another common similarity between star and planet formation. Jayawardhana said it is too early to draw that connection, since the new observations pertain only to brown dwarfs.

"I would say this is explicitly a similarity between brown dwarfs and stars," he said.

© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks theFIRMbss and shibumi.

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[SunkenCiv]

Fascinating series of topics about these spots here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/jupiter/index

A select few:

Third Red Spot Erupts On Jupiter
New Scientist | 5-22-2008 | David Shiga
Posted on 05/22/2008 10:21:40 AM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2019773/posts

Io Creates Spots on Jupiter
(glowing spots come from electron beams whipping around moon Io)
Space.com on Yahoo | 3/17/08 | Charles Q. Choi
Posted on 03/17/2008 8:17:23 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1987385/posts

Jupiter’s Little Red Spot Growing Stronger
ScienceDaily | Saturday, October 14, 2006 | NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Posted on 10/14/2006 5:05:01 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1719531/posts

Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA | 7/25/2006 | Travis Rector
Posted on 07/25/2006 5:43:42 PM PDT by sig226
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1672241/posts

[theFIRMbss]

>"There are black holes that are 3 million solar masses spewing jets, and there's this thing, which is 2 percent of a solar mass, doing the same thing," said study team member Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto

If I would question
"conventional wisdom" on
our understanding

of astrophysics,
I'd focus on this bit of
scale invariance.

Most things in real life
depend on relationships
that are fixed to size.

What works at one scale
fails badly at another.
(No giant insects!)

Yet here we have "jets"
with seemingly similar
physics at their roots

but their scales couldn't
really be farther apart.
I suspect something

is going on here
that will alter our thinking
as we learn more facts.

[Swordmaker]

Yet here we have "jets"
with seemingly similar
physics at their roots

but their scales couldn't
really be farther apart.
I suspect something

is going on here
that will alter our thinking
as we learn more facts.

I agree. Plasma phenomena are scalable from the very small to the cosmically huge... and this particular phenomenon is explainable by plasma physics.

[Swordmaker]

Electric Universe PING!

If you want on or off the Electric Universe Ping List, Freepmail me.

[SunkenCiv]

:’) Well put.

[theFIRMbss]

>Plasma phenomena are scalable from the very small to the cosmically huge...

. . . . .



. . . . .

Yeah, I was thinking
plasma, but my memory
couldn't come up with

how plasma physics
impacted the size of stars.
Does plasma physics

push mass estimates
for minimum size of stars
up or down at all?

[Swordmaker]

Does plasma physics

push mass estimates
for minimum size of stars
up or down at all?

The Electric Universe theory allows for very small stars... down to the size of Saturn... and smaller.

[theFIRMbss]

>The Electric Universe theory allows for very small stars... down to the size of Saturn... and smaller

-----------------------------------------------------------

Plasma physicists argue that stars are formed by an electromagnetic "pinch" effect on widely dispersed gas and dust. The "pinch" is created by the magnetic force between parallel current filaments that are part of the huge electric currents flowing inside a galaxy. It is far more effective than gravity in concentrating matter and, unlike gravity, it can remove excess angular momentum that tends to prevent collapse. Stars will form like beads on a wire until gravity takes over. The late Ralph Juergens, an engineer from Flagstaff, Arizona, in the 1970's took the next mental leap to suggest that the electrical input doesn't stop there and that stars are not thermonuclear engines! This is obvious when the Sun is looked at from an electrical discharge perspective. The galactic currents that create the stars persist to power them. Stars behave as electrodes in a galactic glow discharge. Bright stars like our Sun are great concentrated balls of lightning! The matter inside stars becomes positively charged as electrons drift toward the surface. The resulting internal electrostatic forces prevent stars from collapsing gravitationally and occasionally cause them to "give birth" by electrical fissioning to form companion stars and gas giant planets. Sudden brightening, or a nova outburst marks such an event. That elucidates why stars commonly have partners and why most of the giant planets so far detected closely orbit their parent star. Stellar evolution theory and the age of stars is an elaborate fiction. The appearance of a star is determined largely by its electrical environment and can change suddenly. Plasma physicists and electrical engineers are best able to recognize plasma discharge phenomena. Stellar physics is in the wrong hands.

Electric Stars, at HoloScience.com