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?
In: 583
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”.
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