Jupiter is large enough for the hydrogen to become a plasma and dissolve the rocky “planetary” core that was once at the center. Morphologically, it has passed the transition from planet to star. Saturn appears to be somewhere along that transition and is harder to cleanly classify.
Morphologically, Jupiter is a star.
I’ve seen 13 MJ argued as a boundary, but it’s selected somewhat arbitrarily and based around idealized models of Deuterium fusion, which has never been observed, and which is a process these brown dwarves would only undergo for a brief flash in their early life. Deuterium isn’t abundant enough for its fusion to significantly alter the stellar morphology that has already become established for objects larger than Saturn. Saturn is our solarsystem’s example of an object that does not fit cleanly into one side or the other of a mass-based binary classification scheme for determining a hard boundary between “planet” and “star”. To understand what is a planet vs what is a star, study Saturn.
I’d say Jupiter would need to be about 3 times massive to count as one. And more realistically around 10ish.
Based on what criteria?
Jupiter is large enough for the hydrogen to become a plasma and dissolve the rocky “planetary” core that was once at the center. Morphologically, it has passed the transition from planet to star. Saturn appears to be somewhere along that transition and is harder to cleanly classify.
Morphologically, Jupiter is a star.
I’ve seen 13 MJ argued as a boundary, but it’s selected somewhat arbitrarily and based around idealized models of Deuterium fusion, which has never been observed, and which is a process these brown dwarves would only undergo for a brief flash in their early life. Deuterium isn’t abundant enough for its fusion to significantly alter the stellar morphology that has already become established for objects larger than Saturn. Saturn is our solarsystem’s example of an object that does not fit cleanly into one side or the other of a mass-based binary classification scheme for determining a hard boundary between “planet” and “star”. To understand what is a planet vs what is a star, study Saturn.