I searched and it says it’s a planet composed of solely gas, like helium or hydrogen, but… it is a planet.
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What’s exactly then? Can you send a space shuttle and land on a gas giant, like Saturn and Jupiter or they are merely intangible and you can actually… go through them?
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If so, we could merely get on their moons, like Europa or Io, but not actually go to those planets.
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How does it exactly work?
In: Planetary Science
They’re just planets made out of gas. Planets don’t need to be made out of rock. The gas giants might have a bit of rock at the very core, but the vast majority of their mass is gas. You can’t land on one, rather you’d sink until you either reached equilibrium pressure, or were crushed long before then.
They are called gas giants because they are mostly made out of elements that we know as gases on Earth, hydrogen and helium. Only a relatively thin atmosphere is actually made out of gas. As you go deeper the gas gets thicker and thicker until it becomes a state that’s something between a gas and a liquid (it’s called supercritical state). It’s a smooth transition, so there is no surface you could land on and the pressure gets so high that it’ll crush everything we could send there. Keep going deeper and you’ll find more exotic states – we expect metallic hydrogen in most of Jupiter’s volume. The center has a core of heavier elements like iron and silicon.
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Gas giant planets have very intense gravity, and that means most of their substance is under extremely high pressures.
Because of that although they’re comprised of things that we usually encounter as gases most of their substance is above the liquid-vapour critical point which is where the distinctions between what is a gas and what is a liquid go a bit funny. The pressure also makes them it all very hot.
So they’re not “intangible” like gas at earth’s atmospheric pressure, and if you tried to go through them that pressure would be a really serious impediment.
There may also be a “solid” core somewhere under all that high pressure weirdness, but it’s under even higher pressure at even higher temperatures and so it’s something that challenges our normal definitions of solid as well.
The “Gas” comes from how they are mostly made of things that are gases on earth
The “Giant” comes because they are big, though not big enough to ignite as stars
Jupiter is just under 320 times more massive than earth
Because of that, they have high gravity, enough to compress what would be gas on earth into liquid and maybe at the centre solid.
They have an atmosphere of gas, somewhere below that you’d get a liquid and you would most likely have a solid centre that probably includes some rock.
We have no way to exactly observe the centre of these things and the conditions of pressure and temperature are so far from what is on earth that we cannot replicate them
So they don’t have a surface really, just a nebulous point where the atmosphere turns to liquid and point below that where the sea becomes solid.
You could fly through the atmosphere with current tech, but you’d need to have enough energy to avoid being caught in the massive gravity.
To get to the point where you “land” on a liquid surface you’d need something incredibly pressure resistant and with an incredibly powerful engine to be able to take off again
The easiest way to think of it is probably like imagine the entire planet as water. You cant land because you would sink. At some point of sinking the presure gets so high that anything we can build would be crushed so you cant go through them. So they are very much tangible like water is tangible other than the very outer layers that is like air.
Think of it kind of like earth, you have the core, the mantle, the crust, and then the atmosphere. Gas giants are similar, but their atmosphere is way way thicker then earth. Theoretically if you had an infinitely strong space ship, you could land on a gas giant. You would have to go extremely deep into the planet to reach the solid ground though, because the atmosphere is thicker then the actual crust or mantle. And the reason your ship would need to be infinitely strong is because the atmosphere is so thick that it acts similar to water, where the deeper you go the more pressure builds up. If you go too deep you will end up getting crushed by the pressure.
Space is generally not just empty but instead made up of all kinds of stuff. Stuff can be small rocks to even smaller things like gasses and chemicals you can’t really see until there’s a lot of them together all at once. You know when you fart? That’s a gas. It isn’t just air, stuff is in that air.
In space, your fart along with everything else around is pulled towards things. Gas giants are essentially a big rock like earth, bigger than earth actually and more dense (imagine two birthday cakes, one is fluffy and the other you can barely put your fork through, that one is more dense and weighs more). And because it is more dense it has more gravity, which is to stay, is has more ability to attract much smaller rocks and stuff, like gasses.
So a gas giant is really just a super dense birthday cake that is surrounded by all of the gasses it has attracted over the years.
How you gonna land on a gas? Gas is a state of matter not a type of matter. Anything can be a gas if it’s hot enough, and anything can be a solid if it’s cold enough.
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