September 30, 2024 – by Santina Russo
The powerful impact happened a few million years after the formation of the Sun: A preform of today’s Jupiter, dubbed proto-Jupiter, collided with a celestial body made of rock, ice and hydrogen-helium. Proto-Jupiter had a mass of more than 300 times that of Earth, while the body it collided with was smaller but still had a mass of 10 times that of Earth. The collision and its outcome are visualized in a video animation created by Jean Favre at CSCS, covering 4.4 hours of real time. This work is a first: It’s the first visualization computed on the new ‘Alps’ infrastructure.
The simulation underlying this visualization was performed by scientists in Joachim Stadel’s group at the University of Zürich. The team simulated the massive collision to find out more about Jupiter’s “fuzzy core”: The gas planet’s core has no strict boundary with its atmosphere, with the transition from core to atmosphere being fluid. There are several hypotheses on the reason for this feature, one of which is the visualized giant impact that is thought to have mixed the existing core with the atmosphere.
The simulation included an impressive two billion particles. Collisions between bodies of this size are generally very challenging to model and require considerable computing resources. In turn, they provide a better understanding of the formation and evolution of our solar system.
Head-on impact on proto-Jupiter