News tagged with gas giants
NASA's Juno spacecraft refines its path to Jupiter
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully refined its flight path Wednesday with the mission's first trajectory correction maneuver. The maneuver took place on Feb. 1. It is the first ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Feb 03, 2012 |
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Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception
There are more exoplanets further away from their parent stars than originally thought, according to new astrophysics research.
Jan 12, 2012 |
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New class of planetary systems: Astronomers find two new planets orbiting double suns
Using data from NASAs Kepler Mission, astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting circumbinary planet systems -- planets that orbit two stars. This work establishes that such ...
Jan 11, 2012 |
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Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A
(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.
Jan 04, 2012 |
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The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a new online database of habitable worlds
Scientists are now starting to identify potential habitable exoplanets after nearly twenty years of the detection of the first planets around other stars. Over 700 exoplanets have been detected and confirmed ...
Dec 05, 2011 |
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Caltech-led team of astronomers finds 18 new planets
Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Dec 02, 2011 |
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Mission to mysterious Uranus
Scientists want to send an orbiter and probe to the ice giant planet Uranus, but do the resources exist to support such an ambitious project?
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Oct 12, 2011 |
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Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David ...
Rocky planets could have been born as gas giants
When NASA announced the discovery of over 1,200 new potential planets spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope, almost a quarter of them were thought to be Super-Earths. Now, new research suggests that these ...
Sep 16, 2011 |
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Jupiter-bound space probe captures Earth and Moon
(PhysOrg.com) -- On its way to the biggest planet in the solar system -- Jupiter, NASA's Juno spacecraft took time to capture its home planet and its natural satellite -- the moon.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Aug 31, 2011 |
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Alien world is blacker than coal
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet - a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight ...
Aug 11, 2011 |
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Coming to a solar system near you… super-Earth!
It is our general understanding of solar system composition that planets fall into two categories: gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and rocky bodies that support some type of atmosphere ...
Aug 08, 2011 |
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Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft mated to its rocket
NASA's Juno spacecraft completed its last significant terrestrial journey today, July 27, with a 15-mile (25-kilometer) trip from Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Fla., to its launch pad at the Cape ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Jul 28, 2011 |
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Exoplanet aurora: An out-of-this-world sight
Earth's aurorae, or Northern and Southern Lights, provide a dazzling light show to people living in the polar regions. Shimmering curtains of green and red undulate across the sky like a living thing. New ...
Jul 21, 2011 |
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Twisted tale of our galaxy's ring
(PhysOrg.com) -- New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across ...
Jul 20, 2011 |
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Gas giant
A gas giant (sometimes also known as a Jovian planet after the planet Jupiter, or giant planet) is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in our Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Many extrasolar gas giants have been identified orbiting other stars.
Gas giants can be subdivided into different types. The "traditional" gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered a separate subclass called ice giants, as they are mostly composed of water, ammonia, and methane; the hydrogen and helium in Uranus and Neptune is mostly in the outermost region. Among extrasolar planets, Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their stars and thus have a very high surface temperature; perhaps due to the relative ease of detecting them, Hot Jupiters are currently the most common form of extrasolar planet known.
Gas giants are commonly described as lacking a solid surface, although a more accurate description is to say that they lack a clearly-defined surface. Although they have rocky or metallic cores - in fact, such a core is thought to be required for a gas giant to form - the majority of the mass of Jupiter and Saturn is hydrogen and helium. In the planet's upper layers, these elements are gaseous, as they are on Earth, but further down in the planet's interior, they become compressed into liquids or solids, which become denser toward the core. Similarly, although the majority of Uranus and Neptune is icy, the extreme heat and pressure of these planets' interiors put the ices into less familiar physical states. Therefore, one cannot "land on" gas giants in a traditional sense. Terms such as diameter, surface area, volume, surface temperature, and surface density may refer only to the outermost layer visible from space.
For more information about Gas giant, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
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