JUPITER could be generating heat like an extremely feeble star. It’s been
known for years that the gigantic planet radiates more energy than it receives
from the Sun, but no one has been able to explain where it gets the extra
energy.
Now Marcello Lissia and colleagues from Cagliari University in Sardinia
suggest the energy comes from the fusion of nuclei—the same sort of
nuclear reaction that powers the Sun. Physicists previously thought that fusion
could produce only a billion-billionth of the excess heat.
But those calculations underestimated the number of high energy deuterium
nuclei, the researchers say (www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0112018…
