@kainat0o

Jupiter is so massive that its presence literally shapes the architecture of the solar system — and it almost became a star. • Jupiter is 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets combined. • It’s so huge that the entire solar system orbits around a point just outside the Sun’s surface, called the barycenter. That means the Sun actually wobbles around Jupiter. • And if Jupiter had been about 80 times more massive, nuclear fusion would have ignited in its core and it would have become a second star — a dim one, but still a star. Our solar system would have been a binary star system. So right now, we’re living in what is essentially the “solar system that almost had two suns.”

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