July 22, 2004 LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 13, 2004 -- Nearly five
billion years ago, the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn
formed, apparently in radically different ways. So says a
scientist at the University of California's Los Alamos National
Laboratory who created exhaustive computer models based on
experiments in which the element hydrogen was shocked to
pressures nearly as great as those found inside the two planets.
Working with a French colleague, Didier Saumon of Los Alamos'
Applied Physics Division created models establishing that heavy
elements are concentrated in Saturn's massive core, while those
same elements are mixed throughout Jupiter, with very little or
no central core at all. The study, published in this week's
Astrophysical Journal, showed that refractory elements such as
iron, silicon, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are concentrated in
Saturn's core, but are diffused in Jupiter, leading to a
hypothesis that they were formed through different processes.
Saumon collected data from several re