What if Jupiter was a brown star?

we would be affected?
its gravitational force will be higher?
life would hold its moons? and mars?

Bumping for interest

It would be easier to spot at night, might even be able to see it during the day.
Not sure what would happen to its moons, I think it would be too massive to keep close orbits around it, eating them up.

How is the lifespan of a red dwarf so fucking long? You could build a giant space-base around one and live off it's energy forever.

>ultra cool
hella rad jupiter

Jupiter is big. But would need to be much bigger to be considered a brown dwarf, at least twice Jupiter's mass. Jupiter could in theory be ignited as a fusion powered star but would need help for that. A brown dwarf would be much easier to achieve ignition even though it is still too small to become an ignited star naturally but capable of nuclear ignition potentially..
Jupiter is a mini solar system in itself and could provide some sort of illumination for the moons in its orbit along with our sun, so at least there is potentially that.

I imagine those ultra cool brown dwarves would be perfect environments for life.

because they burn slow and not very hot, it's like the Prius of stars

It uses it's fuel very very slowly.

The age of white dwarfs is fucking mindblowing

Because they burn slowly and convection processes still occur within red dwarfs that don't occur in bigger stars. This convection continuously refills the stars hydrogen content in the core.

8 Jupiter masses IIRC

yfw the universe is not old enough for a white dwarf to have cooled

It emits no light or heat, but other than that, Jupiter was sort of a failed star

Jupiter is literally Earth's gate when you think about it

If you throw a burning object towards Jupiter, would Jupiter ignite?

yes but it wouldn't turn into a star, it's mass is too low to initiate nuclear fusion

It would just burn out, quite quickly, which is why it is really stupid to attempt it, and why no one is doing it

It would be extremely bright

4U

No.
Hundreds of tons of rocks are getting plunged into jupiter every fucking hour, and they make crazy temperatures on entry.

This

Yeah it's gravity would be much stronger. If it were to somehow happen tomorrow by some magical mechanism, the orbits of the solar system would be destabilized.

I became curious and decided to do some calculations.
We'll just assume that Jupiter somehow gained enough mass to become a brown dwarf, so its mass goes from [math]1 M_J[/math] to [math]14 M_J[/math], or around [math]2.65804 x 10^28[/math] kg. Brown dwarfs are roughly the same radius as Jupiter is now, so we'll go ahead and keep it as is, meaning its mean density is now [math]18.57 g/cm^3[/math].
Currently, Jupiter's gravity is 2.528 g (24.79 [math]m/s^2[/math]). Brown-dwarf-Jupiter would have a surface gravity of 37.03 g (362.9 [math]m/s^2[/math]), which is actually greater than the sun's (even though the mass of the sun is 2 orders of magnitude greater than brown-dwarf-Jupiter's, the sun's radius is ten times than of the brown dwarf).
Jupiter's Hill sphere (sphere of influence relative to the sun) would go from approximately 48.2 million km to 121.9 million km.
A lot of Jupiter's moons would be inside the Roche limit, and thus would be torn apart by tidal forces and brown-dwarf-Jupiter would have a beautiful set of rings.

After calculating the Roche limits for 13 moons, it seems like only 4 of Jupiter's moons would be inside the Roche limit for brown-dwarf-Jupiter. Metis, Adrastea, Amalthea, and Thebe.

Red dwarfs last even longer. A red dwarf can burn for upwards of a trillion years. They will be the last to die out, in the end.

I wonder if the universe will have its heat death before todays red dwarfs fully burn out

That would be self-contradictory. For heat-death to occur, it would be necessary that all matter in the universe (including red dwarfs' matter) is roughly the same temperature (that is to say a tiny bit higher than the absolute zero). If there still exist a "burning" red dwarf, then the heat-death of the universe hasn't been reached yet, by definition.

Its possible for a red dwarf to get ripped apart by the expanding universe before it burns up its fuel

Well, if a red dwarf is rippet apart, it stops burning

isn't this the plot of the sequel to 2001?

Thats not heat death, thats the "big rip". Niether of which are confirmed ends of the universe.

>it's like the Prius of stars
- user, 2016