A reminder of how close we came to being a binary star system.
Can you elaborate on us almost being a binary star system?
I'm not sure that OP's statement is relevant to the infrared data in the link. If Jupiter was about 13 times the mass of what it is, it would have enough gravitational pressure to initiate nuclear fusion, i.e. ignite the core, producing a brown dwarf star. Both the radiation and the gravitational perturbation would likely make it impossible for life to develop on Earth. Just ran some code for a system of the Sun (blue, but not visible in the first pic), Earth (red), Jupiter (teal), and Saturn (purple). Looks like if Jupiter's mass instantly (and magically!) increased to 13 times what it is currently, things would be stable for at least 500 years. See the orbit tracks below: Things get more interesting when Jupiter's mass is increased by a factor of 100. Saturn is intermittently flung out and recaptured:
Regarding the starting conditions, would you mind retrying it with Saturn being directly on the opposite side of the Sun from Jupiter when you increase its mass continuously for that amount for half of Jupiter year? I'm stuck at one step with calculation, but I have a hunch that there are going to be some cool effects :D.
Sorry for the ongoing wait, I will try to get to this eventually. Just to clarify, you want Jupiter's mass to vary as time progresses? From 1 Jupiter mass to 13 Jupiter masses, over the course of 5.92 years?
Very interesting, thank you for taking the time to model this!
Thanks :). This is a custom bit of code for a homework assignment written in Python using an "adaptive" (in time-step) Runge Kutta method. The prof wrote some of it to give us a general direction, and then we had to fill in all of the details. It's only a couple hundred lines of code, nothing too crazy.
For Runge-Kutta, you start off with some initial "state", a set of spatial coordinates and velocity components for each body, and then use a differential equation to evolve the system in time. The solution of the differential equation governs how the bodies move. In other words; you take a (small) step forward in time, take stock of where everything is, calculate the force on each body due to the others, calculate the resulting acceleration, and then repeat the process. It can do as many bodies as you like, but the computational intensity increases explonentially (accidentally typed that word out wrong, but I'm keeping it) with each additional body.
There is a class of astronomical body known as a brown dwarf. They are typically between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. This class of bodies essentially straddles the line between a planet and a star, they may be capable of fusing deuterium, and they glow in the red and infrared spectrum. The images of Jupiter in infrared look similar what a brown dwarf would be like if you could see one up close. That said, Jupiter would have had to have sucked up everything in the solar system that isn't the sun, so I am kinda glad that didn't happen.