I mean, Jupiter can’t be solid at center and have huge a layer of gases on top?
In: 5
It is solid at the center, you couldn’t fly straight through it.
We say it’s a “gas giant” because nearly all of the material it’s made of is chemicals you’d think of as a gas. It’s almost entirely hydrogen and helium.
It probably does have a rock/metal core in there somewhere, but more importantly under that much pressure the hydrogen gas is compressed into a liquid metal form once you get down in there far enough.
We know it’s mostly made of these lighter elements because it’s gigantic, but much lighter than you’d expect if it was actually made of rock and metal like Earth.
Saturn is so gaseous it would float in water.
This answer is going to be a bit confusing, but our concept of “solid”, “liquid”, and “gas” is very much tied to the world humans live in, the temperatures and pressures we experience in our daily lives. But in space it’s possible to reach temperatures and pressures far, far, far, beyond our experience and we get these weird states of matter that fit the scientific definitions of solid or liquid, but don’t fit our “concept” of what a solid or liquid look like.
That being said, we don’t *know* what’s in the center of a gas giant, but we can make educated guesses. The most common theory for something like Jupiter does have a solid core, most likely made of super heavy metallic elements kind of like the Earth does. A smaller group of scientists theorize it would have a liquid core, but again “liquid” doesn’t really like a glass of water exactly.
Latest Answers