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
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
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