How do the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn differ from those of terrestrial planets?

Question

I wonder what will happen to a human being set foot on this gas giant planet. Will we burn or freeze?

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

Well first you can’t “set foot” on a gas giant, your ship just keeps plummeting into the increasingly dense gas until it melts or gets crushed from the pressure.

Eventually the pressure and heat is so great in there that there’s no real distinction between liquid and gas, so the interior is more of a vast ocean of compressed supercritical mush.

There’s probably a solid core at the very center, but it’s understandably hard to measure.

Answer 2

The atmospheres are mostly hydrogen and helium gas. There is no real surface to speak of. As you move closer to the core, the pressure increases and it eventually becomes solid. The pressure at that point is so high that nothing really survives anyway

Answer 3

Terrestrial planets like Earth/Mars/etc. are like tennis balls, with a solid surface over which we can walk. The atmosphere is like a blanket of gasses that surround it and is kept there by the gravity of the planet. These gasses are the sorts we breathe every day (like oxygen) and, compared to the size of the planet, terrestrial atmospheres are usually rather thin (kind of like the fuzz that surrounds the tennis ball).

Gas giants like Jupiter/Saturn/etc., are atmospheres basically all the way down. They don’t have a solid surface for you to walk on, and if you tried, you’d just keep falling deeper into the gasses. But interestingly, because these atmospheres are so thick and condensed by the planet’s gravity, as you went deeper you might notice that rather than falling through gas it would almost feel like you’re falling through liquid. Compared to the freezing temperatures at the edge of the atmosphere, the farther a human fell, the more they’d be crushed by the high pressure or burn up entirely. Eventually, the atmosphere gets so hot that it becomes plasma (kind of like superheated gas).

In short, I wouldn’t recommend trying to step foot on a gas giant unless you had some very special technology! Stick to Earth for now <3