interior
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…
esiegel | April 30, 2008But I didn't want one! Stop your whining, Earthlings. We have a serious question to answer, courtesy of Tamara:
What’s the moon like below its surface, moving into the interior? And what’s the current thought on its formation?
Well, we do know a lot about the Moon's insides the same way we know about the Earth's; just like the Earth has earthquakes, the Moon has moonquakes. These tell us about the Moon's interior. From back when we landed on the Moon, we planted the Apollo seismic experiments and saw 28 moonquakes. From these, we learned that the Moon has a crust about 60 km deep, a deep…