Jupiter may have been smacked head-on by an embryonic planet 10 times Earth's mass not long after being formed — a monumental crash with apparent lasting effects on the Jovian core, scientists said on Thursday.
The violent collision, hypothesized by astronomers to explain data collected by NASA's Juno spacecraft, may have occurred just several million years after the birth of the sun roughly 4.5 billion years ago following the dispersal of the primordial disk of dust and gas that gave rise to solar system.
"We believe that impacts, and in particular giant impacts, might have been rather common during the infancy of the solar system. For example, we believe that our moon formed after such an event. However, the impact that we postulate for Jupiter is a real monster," astronomer Andrea Isella of Rice University in Houston said.