What Would Happen If You Fell Into Jupiter?
QUICK ANSWER
If you fell into Jupiter, you'd pass through layers of cold clouds, then hotter gas, then liquid hydrogen, before being crushed by pressure long before reaching the planet's possible core. Jupiter has no solid surface to land on, so you'd never stop falling until the pressure crushed you.
Falling into Jupiter is one of the great hypothetical questions in astronomy, mostly because the answer is so cosmically grim. There's no bottom to land on, the pressure becomes unsurvivable long before you reach the core, and the trip would be over within hours, possibly minutes.
What would the trip look like?
You'd descend through progressively wilder conditions. According to NASA, Jupiter's outermost cloud layer is mostly frozen ammonia at about -234°F. As you descend, you'd pass through clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide (orange and brown), then water clouds with lightning and storms, then deeper hydrogen-helium atmosphere. The pressure increases rapidly. After roughly 1,000 miles, the pressure and temperature would be far beyond anything humans or spacecraft could survive.
When would you stop?
Probably never, in the sense of hitting a surface. Jupiter doesn't have one. Roughly 6,000 miles below the cloud tops, the hydrogen would transition from gas to liquid, then deeper still to liquid metallic hydrogen, an exotic state where hydrogen behaves like a metal under crushing pressure. If you somehow survived that, you might eventually reach Jupiter's core, possibly a dense rocky or icy region thousands of miles deep. But you'd be crushed and incinerated long before getting there. The closest thing to stopping would be your atoms becoming part of Jupiter's interior.
How long would the fall take?
Surprisingly fast. Jupiter's gravity is about 2.5 times Earth's, so you'd accelerate quickly. Without atmospheric resistance to slow you, you could reach Jupiter's interior in hours. But the atmosphere would slow you considerably; you'd reach terminal velocity in the upper clouds and then descend more steadily. The combination of crushing pressure and rising temperature would kill you within minutes of entering the deeper atmosphere, well before you could appreciate the physics of being inside a gas giant.
What did Galileo (the spacecraft) experience?
NASA's Galileo spacecraft sent a small probe into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995. The probe survived for 57 minutes and descended about 95 miles below the cloud tops before being crushed and melted by the pressure and heat. The probe sent back data about Jupiter's atmospheric composition, temperature, and wind speeds during its short trip. It's the only direct sampling of Jupiter's atmosphere humans have ever performed. The Galileo probe remains the closest anything we've built has come to falling into a gas giant.
Falling into Jupiter would mean a fast trip through increasingly extreme atmosphere, with the pressure killing you well before you reached any solid material. There's no bottom to land on, no surface to crash into. You'd become part of Jupiter as your atoms got mixed into the planet's interior. It's one of the more unique ways to die in the solar system.
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