What Is Jupiter Made Of?
QUICK ANSWER
Jupiter is made of about 90 percent hydrogen and 10 percent helium, with trace amounts of methane, ammonia, water, and other compounds. It has no solid surface. The gas grows denser as you go deeper, eventually becoming a liquid, then a strange electrically conductive metallic state, with a possible rocky core at the center.
Jupiter is essentially a giant ball of hydrogen and helium, the same elements that make up the Sun. There's no surface to stand on; the planet transitions gradually from atmosphere to liquid to something stranger as you go deeper. The composition is closer to a star's than to Earth's, just without the mass to ignite.
What is Jupiter's composition?
Mostly hydrogen and helium, the same elements as the Sun. According to NASA, Jupiter is about 90 percent hydrogen and 10 percent helium by number of atoms, with trace amounts of methane, ammonia, water vapor, hydrogen sulfide, and other compounds. The composition is sometimes called solar, meaning it closely resembles what the Sun is made of, just at a smaller scale. Jupiter is the only object in the solar system other than the Sun with this kind of composition.
Does Jupiter have a surface?
No, at least not in the sense of a place you could stand. Jupiter is a gas giant, meaning the planet transitions gradually from gas to liquid to extremely compressed forms of matter as you descend, without ever hitting a solid boundary. The visible top of Jupiter, the cloud layer, is just the outer skin of an atmosphere that goes down for thousands of miles before the hydrogen below it becomes liquid. Spacecraft can't land on Jupiter the way they land on Mars.
What's inside Jupiter?
Layers of increasingly weird stuff. Going down from the cloud tops, you first move through gas (mostly hydrogen) that gradually thickens. Around 6,000 miles down, the pressure is high enough that hydrogen behaves like a liquid. Deeper still, it becomes liquid metallic hydrogen, an electrically conductive state that only exists at extreme pressures. At the center, there may be a rocky core, though NASA's Juno mission suggests the core may be diffuse or fuzzy rather than a clean solid ball.
How does Jupiter compare to a star?
Same ingredients, vastly less mass. Stars have enough mass to compress their cores to temperatures hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium, which is what makes them shine. Jupiter would need to be about 80 times its current mass to become even a small red dwarf star. Despite Jupiter's composition being almost identical to the Sun's, it's essentially a starter kit for a star that never grew large enough to ignite.
Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, with no solid surface and layers that grow increasingly strange as you go deeper. It looks like a planet from outside but it's built more like a small star, missing only the mass needed to fuse its hydrogen. Jupiter is the closest thing the solar system has to a second Sun.
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