It's so scary! All those swirls are like planet size hurricanes. Had Jupiter been bigger, it would have been a star, and life on earth would not have existed. Gives me chills.
Jupiter would need to weigh 13 times its current mass to become a brown dwarf, and about 83 to 85 times its mass to become a low-mass star [1]
[1]: https://www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-could-jupiter-ev...
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Anything that reminds me that we are living in an environment thin as an eggshell on a grain of sand surrounded by an infinite cold and deadly vacuum, punctuated by hellfires that would evaporate our hole planet if we got to close.
There are so preciously few places like Earth. How I wish more of us cared about it.
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> Had Jupiter been bigger, it would have been a star, and life on earth would not have existed.
Not sure a small star (e.g red-dwarf size) in Jupiter’s orbit would make much difference to Earth, other than it being brighter at night when it’s in the sky.
Jupiter's perihelion is only 5AU from the sun. I suspect that Jupiter could fall well short (mass-wise) of being a star, yet still be big enough to destabilize Earth's orbit.