event
Wednesday 23 Aug 2017: Understanding Jupiter's interior in the context of Juno
Mr. Florian Debras - Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
Physics, 4th Floor 14:00-15:00
The NASA's Juno spacecraft has reached Jupiter in summer 2016. In addition to taking pretty pictures of the poles and the red spot, it aims at measuring the gravity field of Jupiter with an unprecedented precision. These new data are meant to provide better constraints on the internal structure of the planet, notably the mass of the core (if there is any) and the metal composition of the planet. Unfortunately, there is no direct, non degenerated way to derive an internal structure from external gravitational measurements. In this talk, I will explain how to constrain gaseous planets interior from observations, and will then study in depth the Concentric MacLaurin Spheroid method proposed by Hubbard in 2013. The study of the limitations of this method, the only current one being able to fully exploit the Juno's data, will raise the question of the need of such precision on the gravitational data to improve our understanding of Jupiter's interior.
