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
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.
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