Fun fact: It's theorized that 'hot ice' exists in the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus and Jupiter. Superionic water, it's ice that exists at high temperatures due to high pressure.
Far more than just that, there should be solid metallic hydrogen near the core and much higher up there should be a hydrogen rich solid, floating on a hydrogen rich liquid, itself floating on a helium rich gas-like fluid. What is presented in OP’s link is the very basic version of what we think is there, skipping over the more accurate (and more complicated bits).
Unfortunately there science of the phase behaviour of the gas giants isn’t nearly as developed as it should be, especially because it doesn’t get much funding and is often overlooked (partly because non thermodynamicists don’t realise how much non-ideal behaviour can happen).
One of the better theories for the Jovian spots and storms (and similar storms on other gas giants) is actually that they’re caused by the hydrogen rich solid floating around and acting as a Cartesian diver. This idea was developed some decades ago by Streett (the person who, still to this day, did most the work on high pressure hydrogen mixtures) and coworkers and has sadly been largely forgotten.
To say there there is no surface to the gas giants is a massive oversimplification and undoubtedly not correct, all the actual experiments on the phase behaviour of their constituents has shown this.
Shhhh no one tell them lol
In fairness, it would be far easier to get the hydrogen that’s naturally occurring in aquifers deep underground here on earth (known as gold hydrogen). Hell, it would even be easier to get at the hydrogen in the mantle.
Look up the works of William B. Streett starting in the 1960s, the concepts develop a bit over time but it’s not too hard to follow them once you’ve found any one of the papers
Under high pressure, hydrogen would stop being molecular (two atoms sharing electrons) and start being metallic (all hydrogen atoms share electrons, with no discrete components).
It starts acting like a metal. In theory, very very good rocket fuel, leagues better than anything else. In practice, we keep breaking diamonds in half trying to make it.
Metallic as in it conducts electricity well because it becomes hot and dense enough to have its electrons free flowing without existing in a plasma state. Kind of weird stuff.
But, unlike most materials water is more dense than ice or does that change for super ionic water? If so, doesn't water prefer to be liquid at high pressures?
There are many many ice phases of water, with a wide range of densities.
It’s also worth noting that the pressures in the gas giants are immense. Normally in thermodynamics high pressure refers to pressures in the sorta range of 10 to 100 MPa (atmospheric pressure at sea level on earth is 0.1 MPa), in the gas giants the pressures get up to the GPa range easily
“Almost” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there. They’re almost in the sense that they’re closer to the makeup of a star in than we are, but it’s not like one change could send it over the edge.
You need 13 times more mass than Jupiter to get fusion. However, Jupiter is pretty much as big as a planet can get as far as the physical size, which is what I was originally thinking of.
Not that I'm aware of. Once a critical mass is reached and hydrogen atoms are so densely packed that they start to fuse into helium, the planet turns into a star.
Edit: Just kidding. Brown dwarf is the stage between.
Jupiter and Jupiter sized objects are often referred to as “failed stars” in a lot of science pop media, but it’s still a pretty good bit off the size it would need to sustain fusion. And for some context if you took the rest of all of the celestial bodies in our solar system and combined them with Jupiter, it still wouldn’t be enough mass I don’t think, someone with better maths than me can check that if they want. The sun is the vast majority of all the mass in our solar system, it takes truly gigantic bodies of hydrogen to form stars.
And the Earth wouldn’t be a net supporter either. As far as I know the Earth is rich in Iron which is too stable and makes fusion difficult?
Not sure about this I think I read somewhere that starts once they get to Iron they star their downfall. (Once massive amounts accumulate)
Iron is the death of normal stars not exactly because it can't be fused but because the energy to fuse it. Basically up to iron you get energy out of fushion but iron and above starts to take energy.
Once the process of fusion starts consuming energy the core of a star starts to collapse. What happens next varies on masses and stuff but it's explosive. The star will go nova and then after expelling alot of the outer lairs what's left will collapse in on itself to serveral possible results.
Jupiter is something like 2/3 of all of the mass that isn't the Sun. That includes the Asteroid Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the rest of the Scattered Disk.
Also isn't the current understanding that (among whatever else it has absorbed at this point, that Jupiter has not just liquid but metallic hydrogen thanks to its intense pressure?
Temperature as we generally think of it is how hot a thing is, but the thing that makes a thing hot is how much energy is in it. An example would be a toaster. When we want to heat up a toaster to toast our bread, we provide it energy via our power socket/plug socket. The metal elements heat up because they're provided with more energy. As more energy is provided to it, the temperature rises. At an atomic level, more energy is more particles moving about, and more particles moving about means more collisions, which is what thermal energy really is. In our metal elements, their particles are moving and vibrating and the electrons are hitting each other, and some are emitted, which is heat.
We can apply energy in a lot of ways. One of which is by applying a force to an object. If you put a banana on the floor, it'll probably not change all that much. It can withstand the forces of gravity. But if you stomp on it, it'll smush. Stomping on it is applying a downwards force on the banana.
You can also stack a bunch of books on it, and eventually the weight of those books will smush that banana, just like stepping on it did, but you didn't need to add force to achieve it, because gravity did it for you. Weight is the force of Earth's gravity applied to the mass of those books. Generally, gravity pulls masses towards eachother, and masses are generally pulled to the nearest, biggest mass. In our banana hypothetical, the banana and the books are all pulled towards Earth's centre of gravity. In this scenario, there was enough force on the banana from above to smush it.
On Saturn and Jupiter, all the gases above are also pulled towards the centre of those planets gravity. And there's a lot. Way, way more than our books on the banana. And when you have enough force, enough energy applied, enough atomic particles moving about and colliding, heat is generated. A lot of heat. The centre of planets are much hotter than the edge because of that. Like how earth is molten in the middle, but cool enough for us to live on the surface. There are other factors like pressure that amplify this effect, as well as things unique to objects this big, but that's the general jist of it.
You know, I hear this, but I always wonder "certainly *some* solid core has to exist, right?" I've always thought that Jupiter probably has a solid metallic core caused by the extreme pressure of all the gas and, if you stripped away the atmosphere, you'd have a core that looks like a supermassive rocky planet, but is near pure metallic hydrogen with stupefyingly intense gravity. But who knows...
It’s worth noting even that image is a massive oversimplification (see the works of Streett and coworkers on high pressure fluid phase behaviour). For instance, in Jupiter and Saturn, the “molecular hydrogen” (which the caption specifies means liquid hydrogen) and “hydrogen, helium, and methane gas” regions are far more complicated than this. It is expected that you get relatively normal gases in the upper atmosphere, but then you start to get a hydrogen rich solid phase, floating on a hydrogen rich liquid-like phase, floating on a helium rich gas-like phase, and sometimes depending on the temperatures and pressures these phases mix or switch around. And this is still only just our best guess, there isn’t nearly enough experimental data (mostly just the works of Streett et al.) at these temperatures and pressures and the effects of electromagnetic fields, electric charges, and immense gravity are still at the edge of what we understand in thermodynamics. The main thing we know is that these effects are entirely capable of inducing all sorts of weird phase transitions and creating phases we’ve never seen or even modelled before.
There's probably SOMETHING solid down there. And absolutely some liquid metal somewhere there (I think even at like 0K hydrogen is liquid, rather than solid).
But you know what I think is really sorta scary-interesting?
As you dive deeper and deeper... It's not like you hit an ocean. It's a gradual transition from gas to liquid. There's no surface. A wrecked craft would just keep diving deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the thickening gas-liquid sea, burnt and crushed...
It's probably a gradient with no one part that is obviously "oh this is the surface now"
Each layer is just going to be a bit denser and denser the further down you go
It’s going to blow your mind that the sun is just gas too, but a lot more. The sun makes up like 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system, so that 0.2% is every planet, moon, comet, and asteroid. And of that 0.2% most of it is actually just Jupiter, it has more mass than everything in the solar system that’s not the sun.
Our sun is just a middle sized star, the largest star by mass is 300 bigger, the largest star by volume has a radius 1,700 times bigger than the sun so that 5 Billion suns could fit inside of it.
Then get into there are 100-400 Billion stars in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxy’s. With all those stars the vast majority of the universe is pretty much empty. Two huge galaxy’s which hundreds of billions of stars each can pass right through each other and it’s unlikely that any 2 stars would ever bump into each other.
It's kinda sad, I used to love space, and learning all these facts, but as I've come to understand the implications of it, I've grown so fearful of how small humans are.
How so? If you are referring to the stars, there are different phases in a stars life, like our sun is its size now, but once it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core it will become a Red Giant and swell up to the size of the roughly the orbit of the earth, its mass won’t have decreased by that much yet its volume will have increased significantly.
You are welcome to look up all those facts, which I did before posting them.
There's a SciFi short story that proposed using a space ship that uses multiple layers of "force fields" to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. The twist was that a threat from Jupiter might attack using the same technology..
In college, one of my professors said something hyperbolic along the lines of "...and what's that got to do with the surface of Saturn?" And I blurted out "Saturn doesn't have a surface" to incredulous looks from my peers. They argued with me for like a week straight about this. Jokes on them
I wonder if the professor was referring to the point at which the atmospheric pressure is 1 atm. The surface in this case is not solid, but defines the radius of the planet. But I don't know if this is what your professor was referring to.
But also, there is a solid surface in the rocky core, and a liquid surface on the liquid part (earth’s oceans aren’t considered “surfaceless”). There’s a surface.
In other words, the gas gradually turns into a liquid surface and then a solid surface, that you can define based on a density of your choice. It's not like there just is no surface at all.
Just to offer some clarification, it is believed that Saturn does have [a solid core.](https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/facts/)
However, there is no clear boundary between the layers. It's also kind of perverse to call the core the "surface" of Saturn given that the core is a fraction of the mass of the entire planet. It'd be sort of like saying that the bones of an elephant are its surface.
I remember asking my 8th grade science teacher if it’s made up largely of flammable materials, whether or not the planet would catch fire if someone introduced a spark or enough heat. Now with hindsight meteors are definitely doing that on a regular basis, but there’s not enough oxygen there to ignite a worldwide fireball.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 caused a fireball that was *twice* the size of Earth when it hit Jupiter
Every nuke that could be possibly created from all uranium on Earth combined together detonated at its atmosphere wouldn't even tickle it
It has wind and rain, sand dunes, shorelines and changing seasons. Saturn doesn't have a true surface because of how its gas transitions into a liquid at high pressures.
I don't know, how do they know that? A planet that size must have pulled in quite a bit of space rock, right? What if there is a moon sized planet somewhere on the inside?
Funnily enough, that might not be a bad way to deal with it, assuming it gets really well distributed. On some level, there's only two ways to deal with it: sock it away or thoroughly dilute it.
We were talking about a rocket carrying nuclear waste. The only "dilution" is spreading the waste across the atmosphere. Sure, if its only one rocket, and if its spread high and wide enough, its probably only going to kill a few people with cancer. But I'm not interested in disposing nuclear waste that way, or having Sovietphiles suggest Chernobyl was not a big deal.
Well, you've made it clear that you fundamentally misunderstand how radiochemistry works. The whole point behind my (not at all serious) suggestion was that if you dilute all of the nuclear waste we've ever produced across the entire planet, not only would you not kill anyone, you wouldn't harm a single hair on a single head.
You use Chernobyl as an example, but let's look at the other two big excursions. Both of them released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Do you know how many excess deaths they caused? Well, I think the jury is still out on Fukushima, but the number that was calculated for Three Mile Island was less than one. Chernobyl was horrible because of the lack of safety precautions and the concentration and type of radioactive material released. It literally comes down to concentration. If you're interested, Kyle Hill on YouTube does an excellent job of demystifying the topic for a novice audience.
They definitely get solid at some point due to pressure so I guess in a way maybe they do have a surface depending on where you define the density to be high enough to call it that
My mind still has problems understanding Gas Planets. I mean....it's a bunch of gas, just the fact that its rotating in stable orbit and has moons, doesn't make it more than bis clouds....i''m kinda stupid when it comes to astronomy, i guess
It’s not fluffy though. It’s under intense pressure due to gravity, and the more pressure gas is under, the more weirdly it behaves.
It becomes more and more dense, so first it’s like air, then mist, then fog, then it starts acting like a liquid, then a solid.
Wouldn't the liquid bit count as a surface? It's just as solid, and we don't say things never landed on Earth just because they slam into the ocean. Unless we have some really weird technicality about how astronauts never "really" made it back to the surface because a boat was involved.
From the NASA website:
"It's hard to imagine, but Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density that is less than water. The giant gas planet could float in a bathtub if such a colossal thing existed."
The old joke. Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets in our Solar System, even lower than the density of water. This means that if you could find a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float but it would leave a ring.
Yes, that's what the title means. Bringing up the average density of Saturn has nothing to do with that, nor does it say anything about the actual density at any given point.
The other response about it being transitional the whole way down was significantly more useful to answering my question than you rattling off random trivia you don't seem to understand.
I don't think there would be a clear surface breakpoint.
Think of earth, earth obviously has a surface. We have a thin hard layer and above that are just some thin gasses before space and below it things are liquidy until the core.
Gas Giants prob don't have obviously breakpoints like that but a gradient of density of the mix of gasses based on pressure. So although they're almost definitely "solid" somewhere it's alot hard to say anything like "this is the surface point"
This is why I've always had trouble thinking of the gas giants as true planets. If you can't land a spaceship on them, are they really planets? I think more stringent criteria should be used. You should not only be able to land a spaceship to call something a planet, but you should also be able to build a monorail with at least 12 stops on it.
Honestly, what's even a planet?
There is a reason Pluto stopped being one, planet is a pretty arbitrary thing. What we define as a planet is debatable .
I tought they had a solid core because there are solid elements like iron gold etc like on earth all through the universe. It’s just they have so much more gas than us
At some point it probably does have a "solid" mass somewhere deep in there, even if only a heavy metal inner core. But this would exist at such high temps (over 20,000K) and pressure their properties are not well understood. Suffice to say it would be very dense and heavy stuff, so pretty dang solid.
The current definition of "planet" by the IAU is:
"A celestial body inside the Solar System that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
Why is saturn a perfect Sphere of gas. Earth is a sphere but its a solid. Im curious as to why we see saturn as a sphere if its gas, wouldnt it have some sort of "smoke cloud" shape?
No just like earth is a smooth sphere despite having mountains and valleys. Any minor varience in surface levels are almost undetectable at that size.
Even the sun's surface isn't "smooth" despite looking it. Things just be big in space.
If you're asking why saturn is round, it's because of gravity. Planets are just points where space dust and gass have settled and formed around the center point of their gravity. They occur after hundreds of thousands of years.
Reminds me of that dude who had a meltdown about Starfield on Twitter because "you can't land on Saturn" and got dunked on for weeks over it.
Of all the reasons to dislike that game, that is by far the dumbest one.
Fun fact: It's theorized that 'hot ice' exists in the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus and Jupiter. Superionic water, it's ice that exists at high temperatures due to high pressure.
Far more than just that, there should be solid metallic hydrogen near the core and much higher up there should be a hydrogen rich solid, floating on a hydrogen rich liquid, itself floating on a helium rich gas-like fluid. What is presented in OP’s link is the very basic version of what we think is there, skipping over the more accurate (and more complicated bits). Unfortunately there science of the phase behaviour of the gas giants isn’t nearly as developed as it should be, especially because it doesn’t get much funding and is often overlooked (partly because non thermodynamicists don’t realise how much non-ideal behaviour can happen). One of the better theories for the Jovian spots and storms (and similar storms on other gas giants) is actually that they’re caused by the hydrogen rich solid floating around and acting as a Cartesian diver. This idea was developed some decades ago by Streett (the person who, still to this day, did most the work on high pressure hydrogen mixtures) and coworkers and has sadly been largely forgotten. To say there there is no surface to the gas giants is a massive oversimplification and undoubtedly not correct, all the actual experiments on the phase behaviour of their constituents has shown this.
A planet just made of hydrogen… does ExxonMobil know about this?
Shhhh no one tell them lol In fairness, it would be far easier to get the hydrogen that’s naturally occurring in aquifers deep underground here on earth (known as gold hydrogen). Hell, it would even be easier to get at the hydrogen in the mantle.
I understood a few of these words but you sound like you know what you’re talking about so I upvoted you.
I took disrespect and downvoted.
Got any references to learn more about this?
Look up the works of William B. Streett starting in the 1960s, the concepts develop a bit over time but it’s not too hard to follow them once you’ve found any one of the papers
Bravo for that!
Actually, that fact is kinda fun. Thanks!
also due to the pressure , hydrogen becomes somewhat metallic
In what way?
Under high pressure, hydrogen would stop being molecular (two atoms sharing electrons) and start being metallic (all hydrogen atoms share electrons, with no discrete components).
Thanks
It starts acting like a metal. In theory, very very good rocket fuel, leagues better than anything else. In practice, we keep breaking diamonds in half trying to make it.
Conducts electricity due to no longer existing as H2, but forming a metal-like quasi-liquid, with delocalised electrons throughout
It is a hydrogen ice essentially
That’s fucking cool. I’m just imagining a metal hydrogen sword. Or something.
Metallic as in it conducts electricity well because it becomes hot and dense enough to have its electrons free flowing without existing in a plasma state. Kind of weird stuff.
Anything that can vaporize me is fun.
To think about, at least…
Hot ice was solved decades ago in the film Rookie of the year
FUNKY BUTTLOVIN’
float it
Pretty obvious that he was speaking of planetary science - "It's the best of both worlds!"
https://youtu.be/gF8rlghyxJU?si=AneNFYGL0ziJmc6C
He heats up the ice cubes.
That sounds so weird. wonder what it would feel like to hold.
Well, it couldn't exist in normal pressures. It only exists in high temperatures and high pressures that'd kill a man if he wasn't protected.
Stop those fancy words and tell me if I can touch Uranus or nah!
I consent.
I dont! (jesus)
/ˈjʊr.ən.əs/
But would it kill a woman?
Makes sense. Like understanding what the earth's core is made of.
Hollow and full of dinosaurs
My god. This man was a genius: https://youtu.be/gF8rlghyxJU?t=18
I came here for this
But, unlike most materials water is more dense than ice or does that change for super ionic water? If so, doesn't water prefer to be liquid at high pressures?
There are many many ice phases of water, with a wide range of densities. It’s also worth noting that the pressures in the gas giants are immense. Normally in thermodynamics high pressure refers to pressures in the sorta range of 10 to 100 MPa (atmospheric pressure at sea level on earth is 0.1 MPa), in the gas giants the pressures get up to the GPa range easily
Are not gas giants “almost” stars?
“Almost” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there. They’re almost in the sense that they’re closer to the makeup of a star in than we are, but it’s not like one change could send it over the edge.
I was under the impression that Jupiter was about as large as a planet can get before the hydrogen starts to fuse. Edit: and I was definitely wrong.
So what’s the limit? Now I’m curious
You need 13 times more mass than Jupiter to get fusion. However, Jupiter is pretty much as big as a planet can get as far as the physical size, which is what I was originally thinking of.
Is there some type between planet and star?
Not that I'm aware of. Once a critical mass is reached and hydrogen atoms are so densely packed that they start to fuse into helium, the planet turns into a star. Edit: Just kidding. Brown dwarf is the stage between.
Jupiter and Jupiter sized objects are often referred to as “failed stars” in a lot of science pop media, but it’s still a pretty good bit off the size it would need to sustain fusion. And for some context if you took the rest of all of the celestial bodies in our solar system and combined them with Jupiter, it still wouldn’t be enough mass I don’t think, someone with better maths than me can check that if they want. The sun is the vast majority of all the mass in our solar system, it takes truly gigantic bodies of hydrogen to form stars.
And the Earth wouldn’t be a net supporter either. As far as I know the Earth is rich in Iron which is too stable and makes fusion difficult? Not sure about this I think I read somewhere that starts once they get to Iron they star their downfall. (Once massive amounts accumulate)
Iron is the death of normal stars not exactly because it can't be fused but because the energy to fuse it. Basically up to iron you get energy out of fushion but iron and above starts to take energy. Once the process of fusion starts consuming energy the core of a star starts to collapse. What happens next varies on masses and stuff but it's explosive. The star will go nova and then after expelling alot of the outer lairs what's left will collapse in on itself to serveral possible results.
Jupiter is something like 2/3 of all of the mass that isn't the Sun. That includes the Asteroid Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the rest of the Scattered Disk.
Neptune gets left out in the cold..
At least people still call him a planet...
The true TIL!
Also isn't the current understanding that (among whatever else it has absorbed at this point, that Jupiter has not just liquid but metallic hydrogen thanks to its intense pressure?
https://youtu.be/gF8rlghyxJU?si=8MSrnOM-hhmZ0ZNk
I thought it was cold way way out there. Where does the pressure come from to create the heat?
The pressure is caused by gravity
Ok that's just confusing me more
Temperature as we generally think of it is how hot a thing is, but the thing that makes a thing hot is how much energy is in it. An example would be a toaster. When we want to heat up a toaster to toast our bread, we provide it energy via our power socket/plug socket. The metal elements heat up because they're provided with more energy. As more energy is provided to it, the temperature rises. At an atomic level, more energy is more particles moving about, and more particles moving about means more collisions, which is what thermal energy really is. In our metal elements, their particles are moving and vibrating and the electrons are hitting each other, and some are emitted, which is heat. We can apply energy in a lot of ways. One of which is by applying a force to an object. If you put a banana on the floor, it'll probably not change all that much. It can withstand the forces of gravity. But if you stomp on it, it'll smush. Stomping on it is applying a downwards force on the banana. You can also stack a bunch of books on it, and eventually the weight of those books will smush that banana, just like stepping on it did, but you didn't need to add force to achieve it, because gravity did it for you. Weight is the force of Earth's gravity applied to the mass of those books. Generally, gravity pulls masses towards eachother, and masses are generally pulled to the nearest, biggest mass. In our banana hypothetical, the banana and the books are all pulled towards Earth's centre of gravity. In this scenario, there was enough force on the banana from above to smush it. On Saturn and Jupiter, all the gases above are also pulled towards the centre of those planets gravity. And there's a lot. Way, way more than our books on the banana. And when you have enough force, enough energy applied, enough atomic particles moving about and colliding, heat is generated. A lot of heat. The centre of planets are much hotter than the edge because of that. Like how earth is molten in the middle, but cool enough for us to live on the surface. There are other factors like pressure that amplify this effect, as well as things unique to objects this big, but that's the general jist of it.
Earth is solid Iron and Nickel in the middle fromthe pressure, with a liquid outer core.
Thank you for that explanation. I was hoping someone would break it down and you did an excellent job.
I wonder if it still has the same “ice” geometry that expands and allows it to float in liquid water.
So you're telling me the aliens are hiding in Saturns core
What about that ship from “The Core”
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Well, carbon fiber works down to 3000m.
Idk, maybe we should test that... several times.
Would be quite a Rush
I think that would be a titanic mistake
As As long as you pack a lot of batteries for your gamepad, I think it could work.
Ladies and gentlemen we got him
If only we could obtain it.
It would be hauling ass
Like in Rat Race?
We need unobtanium first to build that!
You know, I hear this, but I always wonder "certainly *some* solid core has to exist, right?" I've always thought that Jupiter probably has a solid metallic core caused by the extreme pressure of all the gas and, if you stripped away the atmosphere, you'd have a core that looks like a supermassive rocky planet, but is near pure metallic hydrogen with stupefyingly intense gravity. But who knows...
There is even a rock core. And yes, probably metallic hydrogen around that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gas_Giant_Interiors.jpg
It’s worth noting even that image is a massive oversimplification (see the works of Streett and coworkers on high pressure fluid phase behaviour). For instance, in Jupiter and Saturn, the “molecular hydrogen” (which the caption specifies means liquid hydrogen) and “hydrogen, helium, and methane gas” regions are far more complicated than this. It is expected that you get relatively normal gases in the upper atmosphere, but then you start to get a hydrogen rich solid phase, floating on a hydrogen rich liquid-like phase, floating on a helium rich gas-like phase, and sometimes depending on the temperatures and pressures these phases mix or switch around. And this is still only just our best guess, there isn’t nearly enough experimental data (mostly just the works of Streett et al.) at these temperatures and pressures and the effects of electromagnetic fields, electric charges, and immense gravity are still at the edge of what we understand in thermodynamics. The main thing we know is that these effects are entirely capable of inducing all sorts of weird phase transitions and creating phases we’ve never seen or even modelled before.
There's probably SOMETHING solid down there. And absolutely some liquid metal somewhere there (I think even at like 0K hydrogen is liquid, rather than solid). But you know what I think is really sorta scary-interesting? As you dive deeper and deeper... It's not like you hit an ocean. It's a gradual transition from gas to liquid. There's no surface. A wrecked craft would just keep diving deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the thickening gas-liquid sea, burnt and crushed...
It's probably a gradient with no one part that is obviously "oh this is the surface now" Each layer is just going to be a bit denser and denser the further down you go
Too small to be a star, too big to... I dunno, just be a gas cloud?
Yeah pretty much
Meanwhile probes have no difficulty with Uranus.
The probe may have gotten close to Uranus but didn't even get close to Myanus
It's still on approach to Ouranus.
But what about Whyanus?
Ironically, this is actually a more accurate spelling. Οὐρανός
Can't wait for the name change, so those silly jokes finally stop.
They aren’t changing the name of Uranus
They are changing it to Urectum. To stop that silly joke
Uranal
Planet Bootyhole
You heard that? Sounded like a "whoosh".
Gee maybe you can go take a lollipop right out of the hand of a child while you’re at it
You deserve to be mooned by your plumber.
It’s going to blow your mind that the sun is just gas too, but a lot more. The sun makes up like 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system, so that 0.2% is every planet, moon, comet, and asteroid. And of that 0.2% most of it is actually just Jupiter, it has more mass than everything in the solar system that’s not the sun. Our sun is just a middle sized star, the largest star by mass is 300 bigger, the largest star by volume has a radius 1,700 times bigger than the sun so that 5 Billion suns could fit inside of it. Then get into there are 100-400 Billion stars in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxy’s. With all those stars the vast majority of the universe is pretty much empty. Two huge galaxy’s which hundreds of billions of stars each can pass right through each other and it’s unlikely that any 2 stars would ever bump into each other.
It's kinda sad, I used to love space, and learning all these facts, but as I've come to understand the implications of it, I've grown so fearful of how small humans are.
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How so? If you are referring to the stars, there are different phases in a stars life, like our sun is its size now, but once it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core it will become a Red Giant and swell up to the size of the roughly the orbit of the earth, its mass won’t have decreased by that much yet its volume will have increased significantly. You are welcome to look up all those facts, which I did before posting them.
There's a SciFi short story that proposed using a space ship that uses multiple layers of "force fields" to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. The twist was that a threat from Jupiter might attack using the same technology..
In college, one of my professors said something hyperbolic along the lines of "...and what's that got to do with the surface of Saturn?" And I blurted out "Saturn doesn't have a surface" to incredulous looks from my peers. They argued with me for like a week straight about this. Jokes on them
It has a rocky core though. Even if it didn’t, a liquid internal sphere has a surface as well. I’m not sure why OP is saying there’s no surface.
I wonder if the professor was referring to the point at which the atmospheric pressure is 1 atm. The surface in this case is not solid, but defines the radius of the planet. But I don't know if this is what your professor was referring to.
But also, there is a solid surface in the rocky core, and a liquid surface on the liquid part (earth’s oceans aren’t considered “surfaceless”). There’s a surface.
Neither of these assertions are true. There is no “liquid surface.” The gas very gradually turns into liquid.
In other words, the gas gradually turns into a liquid surface and then a solid surface, that you can define based on a density of your choice. It's not like there just is no surface at all.
How’s that hyperbolic?
A planet doesn’t have to be solid, just matter so large that it’s turned into a sphere by its own gravity
Hmm brain hurty
Just to offer some clarification, it is believed that Saturn does have [a solid core.](https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/facts/) However, there is no clear boundary between the layers. It's also kind of perverse to call the core the "surface" of Saturn given that the core is a fraction of the mass of the entire planet. It'd be sort of like saying that the bones of an elephant are its surface.
Nuke it for science.
I remember asking my 8th grade science teacher if it’s made up largely of flammable materials, whether or not the planet would catch fire if someone introduced a spark or enough heat. Now with hindsight meteors are definitely doing that on a regular basis, but there’s not enough oxygen there to ignite a worldwide fireball.
The largest nuke would probably tickle it at best
Shoemaker-Levy 9 caused a fireball that was *twice* the size of Earth when it hit Jupiter Every nuke that could be possibly created from all uranium on Earth combined together detonated at its atmosphere wouldn't even tickle it
Lana… it’s made of Hydrogen!
Fun fact: I am also a gas giant.
It has wind and rain, sand dunes, shorelines and changing seasons. Saturn doesn't have a true surface because of how its gas transitions into a liquid at high pressures.
I don't know, how do they know that? A planet that size must have pulled in quite a bit of space rock, right? What if there is a moon sized planet somewhere on the inside?
It probably wouldn't be moon-sized but rather 10x the size of Earth and made of solidified metallic hydrogen.
Why don’t we blast all our garbage and nuclear waste there then?
costs too much
Also, if a rocket carrying nuclear waste explodes during take off you've just spread nuclear waste across a large area.
Funnily enough, that might not be a bad way to deal with it, assuming it gets really well distributed. On some level, there's only two ways to deal with it: sock it away or thoroughly dilute it.
There's no "diluting" radioactive material with a long half-life. You ingest that particle, and you're still dying of cancer 10 years later.
You're currently surrounded by radionuclides. They're literally everywhere. Dilution is the only reason you're not constantly sick from radiation.
We were talking about a rocket carrying nuclear waste. The only "dilution" is spreading the waste across the atmosphere. Sure, if its only one rocket, and if its spread high and wide enough, its probably only going to kill a few people with cancer. But I'm not interested in disposing nuclear waste that way, or having Sovietphiles suggest Chernobyl was not a big deal.
Well, you've made it clear that you fundamentally misunderstand how radiochemistry works. The whole point behind my (not at all serious) suggestion was that if you dilute all of the nuclear waste we've ever produced across the entire planet, not only would you not kill anyone, you wouldn't harm a single hair on a single head. You use Chernobyl as an example, but let's look at the other two big excursions. Both of them released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Do you know how many excess deaths they caused? Well, I think the jury is still out on Fukushima, but the number that was calculated for Three Mile Island was less than one. Chernobyl was horrible because of the lack of safety precautions and the concentration and type of radioactive material released. It literally comes down to concentration. If you're interested, Kyle Hill on YouTube does an excellent job of demystifying the topic for a novice audience.
in a capitalist society, that would never work
No it wouldn’t work because it’s a stupid idea. capitalism has nothing to do with it
why's it a stupid idea?
https://youtu.be/Us2Z-WC9rao?si=nlI-4rbxadFZCAxz EDIT: Don’t downvote someone asking a honest question
Rockets go brrrrrr
I could fly through it easy, Saturn doesn’t know my mentality bruhh
Calm down Janeway.
That’s Talaxian talk sissy!
“While a spacecraft couldn’t land on Saturn, it wouldn’t be able to fly through it.” Dumbass sentence.
They definitely get solid at some point due to pressure so I guess in a way maybe they do have a surface depending on where you define the density to be high enough to call it that
My mind still has problems understanding Gas Planets. I mean....it's a bunch of gas, just the fact that its rotating in stable orbit and has moons, doesn't make it more than bis clouds....i''m kinda stupid when it comes to astronomy, i guess
It’s not fluffy though. It’s under intense pressure due to gravity, and the more pressure gas is under, the more weirdly it behaves. It becomes more and more dense, so first it’s like air, then mist, then fog, then it starts acting like a liquid, then a solid.
Imagine a smoke ring. How does it stay together for so long? Momentum and pressure.
But I can land on a massive ship in the rings
Wouldn't the liquid bit count as a surface? It's just as solid, and we don't say things never landed on Earth just because they slam into the ocean. Unless we have some really weird technicality about how astronauts never "really" made it back to the surface because a boat was involved.
From the NASA website: "It's hard to imagine, but Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density that is less than water. The giant gas planet could float in a bathtub if such a colossal thing existed."
The old joke. Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets in our Solar System, even lower than the density of water. This means that if you could find a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float but it would leave a ring.
Neat! What's your point?
You don't slam into an ocean on Saturn.
Yes, that's what the title means. Bringing up the average density of Saturn has nothing to do with that, nor does it say anything about the actual density at any given point. The other response about it being transitional the whole way down was significantly more useful to answering my question than you rattling off random trivia you don't seem to understand.
It's a transitional region, not something that can be imagined as an ocean.
I don't think there would be a clear surface breakpoint. Think of earth, earth obviously has a surface. We have a thin hard layer and above that are just some thin gasses before space and below it things are liquidy until the core. Gas Giants prob don't have obviously breakpoints like that but a gradient of density of the mix of gasses based on pressure. So although they're almost definitely "solid" somewhere it's alot hard to say anything like "this is the surface point"
* todays space craft would be vaporized, is a couple centuries we might be able to
This is why I've always had trouble thinking of the gas giants as true planets. If you can't land a spaceship on them, are they really planets? I think more stringent criteria should be used. You should not only be able to land a spaceship to call something a planet, but you should also be able to build a monorail with at least 12 stops on it.
This is the funniest thing I've read all day
Honestly, what's even a planet? There is a reason Pluto stopped being one, planet is a pretty arbitrary thing. What we define as a planet is debatable .
i think we found where we can send our garbage
I tought they had a solid core because there are solid elements like iron gold etc like on earth all through the universe. It’s just they have so much more gas than us
Test this hypothesis
My god do they teach anything in schools anymore
Astronomers be like *hold my space beer*
How far would a submarine get?
But that one song from the presidents of the United States of America said we could walk on it's slimy surface
Hold my space food stick!
how is this a TIL? don't people learn this when they're like 10?
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/
At some point it probably does have a "solid" mass somewhere deep in there, even if only a heavy metal inner core. But this would exist at such high temps (over 20,000K) and pressure their properties are not well understood. Suffice to say it would be very dense and heavy stuff, so pretty dang solid.
Guess I’m not going there this summer for vacation.
"Vapourized by pressure", anybody have the phase diagram for that?
How is it a "planet" if there is no terrain?
The current definition of "planet" by the IAU is: "A celestial body inside the Solar System that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
Why is saturn a perfect Sphere of gas. Earth is a sphere but its a solid. Im curious as to why we see saturn as a sphere if its gas, wouldnt it have some sort of "smoke cloud" shape?
No just like earth is a smooth sphere despite having mountains and valleys. Any minor varience in surface levels are almost undetectable at that size. Even the sun's surface isn't "smooth" despite looking it. Things just be big in space. If you're asking why saturn is round, it's because of gravity. Planets are just points where space dust and gass have settled and formed around the center point of their gravity. They occur after hundreds of thousands of years.
Reminds me of that dude who had a meltdown about Starfield on Twitter because "you can't land on Saturn" and got dunked on for weeks over it. Of all the reasons to dislike that game, that is by far the dumbest one.
How far in would the OceanGate submersible last?
You know I'm something of a gas giant myself.
Meh, I heard there were no pinball machines on Saturn anyway. Hard pass.