wtf are gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, etc)

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I know that they’re mainly composed of gas but is there any solid land underneath that or is it just gas? And if that’s the case how are they capable of having so much gravity?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

>I know that they’re mainly composed of gas but is there any solid land underneath that

It’s weirder than that. The gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and ice giants (Uranus and Neptune) may have a small rocky core deep inside them, but before you get there are layers of supercritical fluids that are neither gases nor liquids, layers of hydrogen under such incredible pressure that they behave like a liquid metal (for the gas giants), or layers of bizarre forms of ice that are solid at temperatures of thousands of degrees (for the ice giants).

There’s no solid surface you could really stand on: you would be crushed and incinerated long before you reached any surface that could support your weight.

>If that’s the case how are they capable of having so much gravity?

There’s a lot of gas. I mean, a *lot* of gas. Just the very outermost layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere weigh as much as the whole Earth.

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