gas giant
esiegel | November 27, 2013“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public.” -Giuseppe Piazzi
So it begins again: the neverending debate about who gets to be a planet and who doesn't. Everyone can bring their own interpretation of the science to the table -- and everyone has their own preferred naming scheme -- but when I think about the Solar System, I try to…
esiegel | January 20, 2010I'm always happy to receive questions from those of you interested enough to ask them, and every once in a while one of them feels just right to write up an article about it. Today's comes from Brad Walker, who asks about the inside of gas giants. Specifically,
The question pertains to the insides of gas giants like Jupiter... My question is, supposing Jupiter is made of Metallic Hydrogen, and it was dragged close enough to the sun that its atmosphere evaporated, what would be left? How would it go from a very strange non-terrestrial core to a rocky body like CoRoT-7b? Why wouldn't the…