Eli5 why is Jupiter surface is gas if it’s so far from the Sun?
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Actually they’re related, and relate to another neat thing about the solar system!
So the lightest element is hydrogen. It’s used in stars for fusion, it makes up the bulk of gas giants, and is a crucial part of life on Earth by being part of water.
However if you get enough of anything, it’ll pull itself together because of gravity.
If you get a bunch of hydrogen together enough to make a ball, you get a gas giant. If you get even more, you get a star, because there’s so much there that it’s being pressed into each other to turn the hydrogen into helium.
Stars are a balancing act though. There’s so much mass that they want to collapse into a little ball, but the fusion in the center prevents that because it’s so much energy.
That energy leaves the star with enough force to shed little particles all around the star, this is called “solar wind”
Solar wind happened the moment that the sun began fusing though and that pushed all of the lighter elements, like hydrogen out of the inner solar system. However, there’s a point (around Jupiter, it turns out) that the solar wind doesn’t have enough force to push it out of that area.
After millions of years, each planet controlled all of the rock, dust, and gas in their orbits, and they’re mostly stable today.
“But what’s the other neat thing?” Well, you know how I said it pushed all of the hydrogen out of the inner solar system? That included all of the hydrogen that Earth has for water. So in the process after fusion has started, but before our modern stability, we collected so many asteroids and comets (it’s thought to mostly a special type of asteroid called a [carbonaceous chondrite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonaceous_chondrite) that we got our oceans that way!
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