I have been searching google for ages and all i find is lore about loki and thor. if gas giants slowly cool and form into ice giants what happens to ice giants? do they just exist forever or what? (prefer an answer that does not include interrupting the ice giants orbit. so no black holes no sun expansion and no rogue cosmic objects.) if everything was fine and not affecting or changing the ice giants over time what would happen to it.
In: Planetary Science
If nothing comes in from the outside or bothers it like you’re asking, then nothing, the ice giant stays an ice giant forever.
Barring hypothethical theoretical stuff like proton decay or all the atoms in the planet fusing into iron via quantum tunneling or dark energy getting stronger and ripping the whole thing apart due to expanding space, it’ll stay static and unchanged forever.
If it’s in an orbit, that orbit will eventually decay though, due to the radiation of gravitational waves from the bodies around which it orbits.
> (prefer an answer that does not include interrupting the ice giants orbit. so no black holes no sun expansion and no rogue cosmic objects.)
Why? *Something* interrupting its orbit is pretty much inevitable. When the sun goes red giant and loses a whole lot of mass later on and can’t maintain the orbits, this is how something will happen to them.
> if everything was fine and not affecting or changing the ice giants over time…
Then it would stay there. But it’s never fine forever.
The earth’s crust is made of frozen rock, is one way to think about it. An ice giant isn’t necessarily any different to a normal planet, if it’s frozen all the way through and doesn’t have a heated molten/liquid core then it will just sit there being hit by what ever comes near it, being flung around what ever is impacting it’s orbit the most. It might be hit by something so big that it gets shattered, or it might be hit by so many smaller things that it loses enough mass to get pushed out of orbit, but nothing is really happening to it.
An ice giant alone with no stars or any other inputs (like MAYBE in intergalactic space) would possibly turn into a sphere of iron. But in a VERY VERY long time, due to quantum tunneling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_star
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