11.2 The giant planets  (Page 3/6)

Just as on Earth, the seasons are even more extreme at the poles. If you were to install a floating platform at the south pole of Uranus, for example, it would experience 42 years of light and 42 years of darkness. Any future astronauts crazy enough to set up camp there could spend most of their lives without ever seeing the Sun.

Strange seasons on uranus.

Composition and structure

Although we cannot see into these planets, astronomers are confident that the interiors of Jupiter and Saturn are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Of course, these gases have been measured only in their atmosphere, but calculations first carried out more than 50 years ago showed that these two light gases are the only possible materials out of which a planet with the observed masses and densities of Jupiter and Saturn could be constructed.

The deep internal structures of these two planets are difficult to predict. This is mainly because these planets are so big that the hydrogen and helium in their centers become tremendously compressed and behave in ways that these gases can never behave on Earth. The best theoretical models we have of Jupiter’s structure predict a central pressure greater than 100 million bars and a central density of about 31 g/cm ³ . (By contrast, Earth’s core has a central pressure of 4 million bars and a central density of 17 g/cm ³ .)

At the pressures inside the giant planets, familiar materials can take on strange forms. A few thousand kilometers below the visible clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, pressures become so great that hydrogen changes from a gaseous to a liquid state. Still deeper, this liquid hydrogen is further compressed and begins to act like a metal, something it never does on Earth. (In a metal, electrons are not firmly attached to their parent nuclei but can wander around. This is why metals are such good conductors of electricity.) On Jupiter, the greater part of the interior is liquid metallic hydrogen.

Because Saturn is less massive, it has only a small volume of metallic hydrogen, but most of its interior is liquid. Uranus and Neptune are too small to reach internal pressures sufficient to liquefy hydrogen. We will return to the discussion of the metallic hydrogen layers when we examine the magnetic fields of the giant planets.

Each of these planets has a core composed of heavier materials, as demonstrated by detailed analyses of their gravitational fields. Presumably these cores are the original rock-and-ice bodies that formed before the capture of gas from the surrounding nebula. The cores exist at pressures of tens of millions of bars. While scientists speak of the giant planet cores being composed of rock and ice, we can be sure that neither rock nor ice assumes any familiar forms at such pressures and temperatures. Remember that what is really meant by “rock” is any material made up primarily of iron, silicon, and oxygen, while the term “ice” in this chapter denotes materials composed primarily of the elements carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in combination with hydrogen.