Could Jupiter Be Ignited for Fusion?

[Mikeral]

The combustible seas of titan are mostly methane right? What's the estimated temperature of those seas? If you can't raise the temperature high enough, you aren't going to have the energy to break apart existing bonds. I'm thinking even if you had an arbitrary unit of methane and oxygen to burn, it wouldn't release enough energy to ignite the next unit, and the reaction of would die. Anyone with a chem book should be able to crunch the numbers and check this.

From what i can see the surface temperature of Titan is ~94K. The energy typically released by a methane combustion is ~882kJ/mol. i have also found the heat capacity of methane to be 35.69kJ/(mol K). The temperature required to sustain combustion is 580℃(853K) therefore if one reaction were to pass its energy to the next in perfect order, i calculate that you need to increase the temperature by 759℃ in order to do this we need 27088kJ/mol of energy. This energy is much larger than the energy released by the combustion, therefore it is safe to believe that a self sustaining combustion of methane on the surface of Titan would be impossible, the energy need to bring the methane to combustion point is far to great to self-sustain.

I used constants applied at 1ATM, although the pressure on Titan is 1.44ATM, in this case i believe that even with a slight pressure difference, the combustion is still not able to sustain itself, but i might be wrong.

To answer the question, the reaction would ignite the next particle, depending on what your initial energy supply is, but the reaction would eventually die out.

 

[qraal]

Why do we say "burn"? You can't get a planetery mass to burn unless is hass more then 50 %of its mass as oxygen.

"Burn" in the fusion sense. A fusion burn is a self-sustaining fusion reaction, which Jupiter can't sustain with its current mass or composition. With deuterium at 1 in 150 abundance (instead of its normal 1 in 6500) a fusion burn could be triggered by a sufficiently energetic triggering input, but deuterium burning rapidly becomes explosive and the planet would probably blow off its outer layers or even disrupt totally. Fortunately concentrated deuterium is hard to come by in our solar system. Inside brown dwarfs above 13 Jupiter masses the core is hot enough for a sustained burn even at the lower concentration, but it's quickly used up in about 50 million years. For comparison hydrogen fusion in the lowest mass stars can last 10 trillion years.