Astronomy 1021 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Water Cycle, Abrasive Blasting, Metallic Hydrogen
16 Dec 2017
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What are jovian planets made of: general composition. Saturn and jupiter are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. More similar to the sun than the terrestrial planets. Some people call jupiter a failed star because it is so large, still 1/80 the size of the lowest density star. Uranus and neptune are much smaller: understanding composition differences. Formed in the far reaches of the solar system where hydrogen was able to condense into ice making more massive planetesimals because hydrogen was so abundant. Eventually they were able to capture gases in their atmosphere. All four jovian planets were thought to have grown from ice rich planetesimals all about the same mass (10 times that of earth) but captured different amount of hydrogen and helium gas. The ice planetesimals now represent about 3% of jupiter"s mass and 10% of saturn"s. They probably took in different amounts of gas than each other because of their distance from the sight.
