– How do gas giants not have a surface? Where do asteroids and comets go when they get sucked in? What’s at the center of a gas giant?

Question

This has always baffled me. I can’t really understand how they could just not have a surface no matter how far down you go. Obviously gravity has to pull the gasses together into some more dense form eventually… right?

In: 775

Answer 1

Imagine a swimming pool with a cloud of steam over it. Imagine that steam is pretty faint up top, just a haze, but gets more and more dense as you go down. Eventually the steam is so dense you can float in it, is that the surface of the water? Maybe, but there’s not really anyway to tell when you go from dense gas to liquid. Go even deeper and you reach water so dense you can’t move through it any more. Is that now solid ice? Again, maybe, but you can’t tell.
That could be called the “surface” since it’s basically solid, but the change from faint haze to solid ice is so gradual that there aren’t really any obvious boundaries between the layers. There’s no defined surface, the gas just gets denser as you go deeper.