A Sea of Metal

Jupiter’s Composition

Jupiter freaks me out. It is huge, big enough to greatly affect the path of any smaller body that is unfortunate enough to cross its path, with potentially adversarial results for Earth. Even more so is its composition. Should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself on a ship heading towards where the surface of Jupiter, you’d have to pass through liquid hydrogen and then would hit metallic hydrogen. While this may seem normal enough, these two layers seem so alien to me when compared with the chemical diversity of Earth’s surface. It is quite fascinating to me the huge difference in composition that a relatively small (on a universal scale) difference in distance from the sun can have on the composition of a planet. Even better is that I know how it happened, thanks to the Nebular Formation theory, and still can’t help but marvel at the diversity of planetary composition between the Terrestrial and Jovian planets.

Theories, Theories Everywhere

What the solar system might actually look like with sun’s movement accounted for.

The formation of our own and other planetary systems is, understandably, one of the most interesting topics in astronomy. But what interests me even more than our current formation theory is how subject it is to change. I do not doubt its validity, but it seems funny to me that with each advancement in the technology of finding extrasolar planets, another challenge to the theory arises. This being said, our theory has held up quite well, in my opinion. The basic concept has remained mostly unchanged, but it has been added on to and refined as necessary, in a relatively quick span of time. This is the theory of what happened in our Universe over a course of 13.7 billion years; yet in only a few decades we are able to refine our Nebular Theory to explain these events. The addition of planetary migration, encounters and resonances has once again made our theory once again seem to explain it all, though questions still (and probably always will) remain.

I guess my point is that I am amazed at how quickly the scientific community can act when it comes to the Nebular Formation theory and astronomy in general. Each ounce of advancement leads to a plethora of new questions about the formation of the universe, and the scientific community has been able to provide a reasonable answer which does not contradict our initial theory each time. And quickly too, especially with compared to the Universal time scale or even the time scale of how long astronomy as a science took to develop.What I get from this is that astronomy is very much a working science; a work in progress. New questions and new answers are being addressed everyday by astronomers and various other scientists. This is the exploration period of the Universe, and much like Christopher Columbus’ famous voyage, I am very excited at the possibility of an Earth-shattering (hopefully not literally) discovery just around the corner.