News tagged with giant planets
New research suggests Fomalhaut B may not be a planet after all
When the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the apparent exoplanet Fomalhaut b in 2008, it was regarded as the first visible light image obtained of a planet orbiting another star. The breakthrough was a ...
Jan 27, 2012 |
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World's most powerful X-ray laser creates two-million-degree matter
Researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world's most powerful X-ray laser to create and probe a two-million-degree piece of matter in a controlled way for the first time. ...
Jan 25, 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 NASA’s 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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Can Earth-sized planets survive their star's expansion?
Two Earth-sized planets have been discovered circling a dying star that has passed the red giant stage. Because of their close orbits, the planets must have been engulfed by their star while it swelled up ...
Dec 21, 2011 |
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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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Under pressure: Ramp-compression smashes record
In the first university-based planetary science experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), researchers have gradually compressed a diamond sample to a record pressure of 50 megabars (50 million times ...
Nov 11, 2011 |
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Giant planet ejected from the solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to an article recently published in ...
Nov 10, 2011 |
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A star with spiral arms
For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy. Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead ...
Nov 01, 2011 |
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Three new planets and a mystery object discovered outside our solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Three planets -- each orbiting its own giant, dying star -- have been discovered by an international research team led by a Penn State University astronomer. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, astronomers ...
Oct 27, 2011 |
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The orbits of exoplanets
(PhysOrg.com) -- An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.
Oct 25, 2011 |
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Nearby planet-forming disk holds water for thousands of oceans
(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to ...
Oct 21, 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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Astronomers find elusive planets in decade-old Hubble data
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then.
Oct 06, 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.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
