Gas giant Definition and 15 Threads

Summary: Can an interstellar planet be hot enough to heat it's terrestrial moon without igniting fusion? I am a science fiction writer, however I am studying astrophysics to better captivate audiences with real and believable plots, The idea in question is an interstellar sub brown dwarf gas...

You're the Galileo for a developing society on a remote archipelago on the far side of a tide-locked moon orbiting a gas giant. How do you figure out your place in that solar system? How do you convince others, who believe your world to be the center of the universe, of the truth? Will a road...

I know that it is probably a gas giant, but why blue? Saturn and Jupiter, and even Uranus aren't blue, so why would Planet X be blue?

Hello, thank you for reading my post. For a story I am working on I am wondering about the plausibility of some star and planet configurations. I have done some web research on my own and learned a lot, but for some things I think my vocabulary and knowledge is too limited to search for exactly...

I'm currently completing a project about gas giants. Could anyone point me in the right direction to find out about the density change as one approaches the centre of a giant? I can kind of do it if I assume it's incompressible, but does anyone know the current theories for it in practice...

Hi, I am doing research for a story and would like to set it on a habitable moon in orbit around a gas giant. I've done a bit of research on this and understand that the moon would likely be tidally locked, so that only one face of the Moon would ever face the gas giant. I understand that...

Hi guys, I've had a question nagging at me for a while - When I was at school, my chemistry teacher taught us that the outer electrons of atoms were bound to the attraction of the nucleus, and the more layers of electrons that were added, the weaker the attraction due to electron "shielding"...

It certainly seems like it. People are far more excited about Titan than they are about Saturn. And the same is true for several other Saturnian moons. Same with Jupiter and its 4 biggest moons. People seem to care more about its 4 moons than Jupiter itself. I'm no exception. But certainly, I...

Hello, I searched and searched, even emailed my astronomer friend in the land down under but I need the answer NOW! LOL. One of our gas giants has a moon that is split in half and when the two halfs meet they trade places. Which gas giant? What are the names of the two half moons...

I have a silly question: what do people understand by "the atmosphere of a gas giant" ? Isn't most of the planet "all atmosphere", or how should one picture this ?

How might hot jupiters arrrive close in, since gas sufficient for their formation would be seem to be further outward? It might seem to require a 3-body 'solution'. That is, must another gas giant have been in the mix for much earlier stages? Perhaps ejecting 1 giant, and retaining the other in...

Dear all, Is anyone aware of any physicists who have worked/working on the theoretical limit to how small a gas giant can form? What is the minimum radius and mass that a gas giant can form at before it's simply evaporates too quickly to become a stable world? I'm guessing some fluid...

Why doesn't the immense gravity of Jupiter and the others turn the gases into solids? (More than just a tiny core, that is.) Does the "gas" at the surface act like a hard solid? About 10 years ago that comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, entered Jupiter's atmosphere, broke up, and caused explosions on the...

How I understand it, the four inner planets are rocky planets because the Sun boiled off most of their atmospheres, while the planets past Mars retained theres. I was wondering if the reason why Jupiter is so big is because it is the closest planet to Mars, so it caught most of the atmosphere...

Out of curiosity, can you produce a self perpetuating nuclear fusion chain reaction - in effect a new sun - by dropping a nuclear bomb deep into the atmosphere of a hydrogen rich gas giant? If a powerful enough weapon was fired on a non-hydrogen atmosphere like Earth's, bearing in mind that...