If Olympus Mons definitively the tallest / largest mountain in our solar system, how do we know the gas giants don’t have similar or larger mountains underneath their thick atmospheres?
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The only information we have about gas giants under the clouds is theoretical. We can’t compare a real mountain we can observe with hypothetical mountains we cannot observe.
Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system THAT WE KNOW OF. The “that we know of” or “so far” is kind of implied.
If we discover a bigger mountain it will be in all the clickbait news articles and you’ll find out at that time
The gravitational pressure at the core of a gas giant is insanely high. Any attempt of solid material to rise up would be met with tremendous resistance.
We don’t “know”, but because of the way gravity works, it’s unlikely for any larger solid structures to be inside the gas giants. Any “mountains” would need to withstand eroding winds stronger than anything here on Earth, withstand gravity between 3 and 8x the gravity on Mars, and then also withstand the incredible heat and pressure that comes with being at the core of a gas giant.
It might sound counterintuitive, but bigger planets have smaller mountains! That’s because they have way more gravity to pull down tall peaks and stop them from forming. If the gas giants had surfaces, any bumps would be way smaller than the mountains on the rocky planets.
But they don’t even have surfaces! They transition smoothly from a gas to a liquid to a solid as you go deeper. So there’s nowhere for a mountain to even “be”.
The jovian planets are “gas giants” because they’re made of gasses. They’re not terrestrial, as in they don’t have rock formations, etc like you find on the terrestrial planets.
Any solid surface they have is likely solid hydrogen at the very core of the planet, but mostly they’re made of gaseous hydrogen and helium just like a star, but not enough of it to cause fusion, which is why they’re often referred to as “failed stars”. It’s unlikely they have anything resembling a volcano like you’d find on a terrestrial planet.
Mountains are like bumps on our planets “skin”. The problem is there’s a massive force called gravity wanting to drag those bumps down because extra mass means the force is greater at the stuff on the bottom.
Mars being smaller and having less gravity means it’s a bit easier for a mountain to form larger.
But the converse is also very likely true as well and the solid portion of a gas giant is likely extremely dense meaning a huge force of gravity pulling it down. This means mountains would have a hard time forming on the solid portion. Not to mention the storms likely buff the surface pretty smooth into a endless cycle of growth and essentially sandblasting
I also have a question related to this, how is Olympus mons’s height measured without a sea level
All science is on a “as far as we know” basis.
Nothing is definitive, or is only until we find new out information.
For the longest time, there was a consensus on the earth being the center of the universe, that atoms were the smallest particle, that there was no such thing as microscopic life.
Knowledge(science) isn’t set in stone.
Ummm….cause they are made of gas and do not have much in the way of solid matter in their composition?
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