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Signs that Jupiter was mixed by a giant impact

Simulations suggest that Jupiter’s dilute core might be the result of a collision between the planet and a Uranus-mass planetary embryo. This finding indicates that giant impacts could be common during planet formation.
  1. Tristan Guillot

    1. Tristan Guillot is in the Université Côte d’Azur, Laboratoire Lagrange, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS UMR 7293, 06304 Nice Cedex 4, France.

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In the past couple of years, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has measured Jupiter’s gravitational field with exquisite accuracy1,2. The results have revealed that the planet’s fluid hydrogen–helium envelope does not have a uniform composition: the inner part contains more heavy elements than the outer part3,4. Writing in Nature, Liu et al.5 propose that this asymmetry resulted from a head-on collision between the young Jupiter and a planetary embryo that had a mass about ten times that of Earth. The authors suggest that the primordial cores of the planet and of the embryo would have merged and then partially mixed with Jupiter’s envelope, explaining the structure of the planet seen today.

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Nature 572, 315-317 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02401-1

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