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 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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