The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel the amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. —Albert Einstein.

A BROWN dwarf is a star which is not lit or is luminous but releases a lot of heat energy. It is not really a star, as I said it only generates a great deal of heat, but is not incandescent enough to light up as a star. Its gasses have not reached a stage where they will begin to be luminous by starting nuclear reaction in its core and other nearby regions. Nor it ever will.

As it begins to spew out heat, it will contract further, further increasing in heat, as the molecules and atoms become doubly agitated and the surrounding areas become hotter by that much. Funny, isn't it?

As heat is released, the size becomes smaller but the body becomes hotter! Not much smaller, though. A few centimetres in a million years could result in the size becoming smaller, and the body becoming hotter by the same, tiny proportion! Worked out on hundreds, or even thousands of millions of years, both factors can result into a significant difference. Naturally, such a star is a brown dwarf because it does not light up, and remains in the ‘cinder’ form. Remember too that such a body is yet in the process of formation, billions of years after coming into being!

In the case of Jupiter it is believed that had the planet been about 50 times bigger, it could have turned into a star. Think about it! Earth would have had two suns instead of one. It would have not known night anywhere! What chaos it would have caused! How it would cause complete disarray in the life forms as we know them. There would be nothing nocturnal.

It would be a strange sight besides. The two stars would have to be much farther apart than is the case now. Instead of the present five astronomical units (AUs) the Sun and Jupiter would have had to be much more than 200 AUs away from each other. May be as far away as 500 AUs. Even then they would be stealing matter from one another, burning up whatever came in between. And in broad day light too!

For one, the Solar System would cease to exist beyond Jupiter (which would be a star, as we have assumed to our peril) because all other gaseous planets would stand gobbled up by two suns forever present in our skies. Then again, there would be no inner planets either, for they would meet the same fate.

Talking about AUs I should have reminded you that an astronomical unit is the unit of distance, where one AU equals the average distance between Sun and Earth, or 93 million miles (150 million km). It is for the convenience of astronomers who end up dealing in large numbers.

So, we are better off with just one Sun rather than two, or worse still, three of them in our blue skies!

But for Jupiter to be 50 times bigger is beyond imagination. Maybe then it would have drifted away, or would have been ensnared by a passing star to become its companion. Maybe the Sun’s companion, you never know! (As discussed sometime back, some scientists think that the Sun has a brown companion star which encircles the Sun once in a million years or so. Nonsense! I refuse to submit to such conjectures).

As you know, Jupiter occupies over 71 per cent mass of the Solar System. In simple terms, it means that the remainder 29 per cent or 30 per cent is engaged in the rest of the Solar System. Even if the whole lot is usurped by planet Jupiter, it will still fall way short of the quantity required by it to become a star. Hence no star business here!

We know and understand that much volume of gasses that belong to Jupiter and the remaining gas giants were obtained from rocky planets like, Mercury, Venus (which has its own thick envelope of gasses), Mars, Earth and Pluto. But we must also understand that a vast amount of gasses belong to these planets intrinsically. That is their very own property. Or, you can say that all of that is not stolen. For a near correct answer we will have to dig a little deeper.

We ought to know, and know well about the crust, mantle and the core of these planets and see what material is in abundance and what sort of influence it has on a particular body. I have already stated that the club of gaseous planets stole much of the gas that the small, rocky planets so painstakingly accumulated early in their infancy. In the end they were left bereft of any gas while planets Jupiter to Neptune took away whatever they could. As you well know, whoever wields the stick owns the buffalo!

The two factors which determine the nature of the planets are, one, their size and the consequent gravitational pull they manage to exert, and two, the matter of which the planets are made. The universe is overwhelmingly profuse with the elements, hydrogen and helium. All others, though important, are of secondary importance here. First, the result of their great mass is that besides being the big boy, the body is a bully too, and they can rob, borrow or steal at will, without impunity. The abundance of whichever material helps us understand the planet’s core, mantle and crust, which in turn help us in many ways in the understanding of the planet itself.