News tagged with gas giants
ALMA turns its eyes to Centaurus A
(Phys.org) -- A new image of the galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the observatory allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes that ...
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Team finds buckyballs grow larger by 'eating' vaporized carbon
(Phys.org) -- Fullerenes were first discovered back in 1985 by a team of physicists vaporizing graphite in helium gas, one class of which, the buckminsterfullerene (C60) named after Buckminster Fuller and ...
Nanotechnology / Nanomaterials
May 30, 2012 |
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JUICE to Jupiter could be ESA’s next major science mission
The Science Programme Committee of the European Space Agency has recommended that the next major space mission for ESA be an orbiter mission to the Jupiter system named JUICE, the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 19, 2012 |
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Jupiter's melting heart sheds light on mysterious exoplanet
Scientists now have evidence that Jupiter's core has been dissolving, and the implications stretch far outside of our solar system.
Mar 22, 2012 |
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Firestorm of star birth in Galaxy Centaurus A
(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.
Mar 08, 2012 |
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Space Image: Beside a giant
(PhysOrg.com) -- Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks small here, pictured to the right of the gas giant in this Cassini spacecraft view.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Feb 29, 2012 |
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The star factory: observing Arp 220
Using the Herschel Space Observatory, Wilson's group has found Arp 220 to have large amounts of very warm molecular hydrogen gas, a surprising find that implies molecular hydrogen is the dominant coolant in the high-temperature ...
Feb 18, 2012 |
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NASA's Juno spacecraft refines its path to Jupiter
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully refined its flight path Wednesday with the mission's first trajectory correction maneuver. The maneuver took place on Feb. 1. It is the first ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Feb 03, 2012 |
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Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception
There are more exoplanets further away from their parent stars than originally thought, according to new astrophysics research.
Jan 12, 2012 |
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New class of planetary systems: Astronomers find two new planets orbiting double suns
Using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission, astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting “circumbinary” planet systems -- planets that orbit two stars. This work establishes that such ...
Jan 11, 2012 |
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Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A
(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.
Jan 04, 2012 |
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The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a new online database of habitable worlds
Scientists are now starting to identify potential habitable exoplanets after nearly twenty years of the detection of the first planets around other stars. Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed ...
Dec 05, 2011 |
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Caltech-led team of astronomers finds 18 new planets
Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Dec 02, 2011 |
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Mission to mysterious Uranus
Scientists want to send an orbiter and probe to the ice giant planet Uranus, but do the resources exist to support such an ambitious project?
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Oct 12, 2011 |
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Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David ...
Sep 22, 2011 |
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Gas giant
A gas giant (sometimes also known as a Jovian planet after the planet Jupiter, or giant planet) is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in our Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Many extrasolar gas giants have been identified orbiting other stars.
Gas giants can be subdivided into different types. The "traditional" gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered a separate subclass called ice giants, as they are mostly composed of water, ammonia, and methane; the hydrogen and helium in Uranus and Neptune is mostly in the outermost region. Among extrasolar planets, Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their stars and thus have a very high surface temperature; perhaps due to the relative ease of detecting them, Hot Jupiters are currently the most common form of extrasolar planet known.
Gas giants are commonly described as lacking a solid surface, although a more accurate description is to say that they lack a clearly-defined surface. Although they have rocky or metallic cores - in fact, such a core is thought to be required for a gas giant to form - the majority of the mass of Jupiter and Saturn is hydrogen and helium. In the planet's upper layers, these elements are gaseous, as they are on Earth, but further down in the planet's interior, they become compressed into liquids or solids, which become denser toward the core. Similarly, although the majority of Uranus and Neptune is icy, the extreme heat and pressure of these planets' interiors put the ices into less familiar physical states. Therefore, one cannot "land on" gas giants in a traditional sense. Terms such as diameter, surface area, volume, surface temperature, and surface density may refer only to the outermost layer visible from space.
For more information about Gas giant, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
