News tagged with giant planets
Oceans of Liquid Diamond May Exist On Neptune and Uranus
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientist explains how it may be possible for the planets Neptune and Uranus to contain liquid diamond oceans.
Jan 18, 2010 |
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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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'This Planet Tastes Funny,' According to Spitzer
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered something odd about a distant planet -- it lacks methane, an ingredient common to many of the planets in our solar system.
Apr 21, 2010 |
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Avatar's moon Pandora could be real
In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable - and inhabited - alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. ...
Dec 17, 2009 |
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First temperate exoplanet sized up (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and the ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have discovered the first “normal” exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. Designated Corot-9b, ...
Mar 17, 2010 |
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Mysterious Planet-like Object Challenges Simple Definition, Reveals Its Surprising Identity
(PhysOrg.com) -- A mysterious planet-like object orbiting a not-quite-starlike "brown dwarf" is the most recent enigma discovered by astronomers with their ever-more powerful telescopes. Kamen Todorov, a graduate ...
Apr 06, 2010 |
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World's largest laser opens (w/Video)
Scientists for decades have been hunting for ways to harness the enormous force of the sun and stars to supply energy here on Earth. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory may spark the light ...
May 29, 2009 |
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Team using Subaru Telescope makes major discovery
An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton University has made the first direct observation of a planet-like object orbiting a star similar to the sun.
Dec 03, 2009 |
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Discovery of an extrasolar earth-sized planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- There are now over 490 confirmed extrasolar planets. The vast majority are gas giants like Jupiter, but they are much stranger because many orbit close to their stars and so are much hotter ...
Oct 08, 2010 |
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Fourth planet foundin giant version of our solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have discovered a fourth giant planet, joining three others that, in 2008, were the subject of the first-ever pictures of a planetary system orbiting another star other than our ...
Dec 08, 2010 |
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Astronomers find elusive planets in decade-old Hubble data
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then.
Oct 06, 2011 |
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Metal Becomes Transparent Under High Pressure
An international team of scientists have discovered a transparent form of the element sodium (Na). The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming ...
Mar 12, 2009 |
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Scientists Find Asteroids Are Missing, and Possibly Why
(PhysOrg.com) -- The patterns of missing asteroids are like the footprints of wandering giant planets preserved in the asteroid belt.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Feb 25, 2009 |
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Seeing the Closest Aliens Will Take Centuries
As telescopes become more advanced, we’ll be able to see more details about planets orbiting other stars - including indications that those planets have life. However, it would probably take many centuries ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 29, 2010 |
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Giant planet ejected from the solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to an article recently published in ...
Nov 10, 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.
