Is it possible to land on a gas giant

Related: How much would you weigh on other planets? The problem with trying to fly through a gas giant is that "the density, pressure and temperature all increase to such enormous levels as you penetrate down into the interior," Fletcher told Live Science.

Near the center of Jupiter, the normally gaseous hydrogen becomes a liquid metal , making this region "as exotic as the surface of the sun," he continued.

To give a sense of the pressure near the center of Jupiter, consider the Mariana Trench on Earth , the deepest place in our oceans. At nearly 7 miles 11 km deep, pressures reach just over 1, bars , kilopascals , which would feel like 8 tons of pressure per square inch , kilopascals.

At sea level, you experience about 1 bar of pressure kilopascals. Near the center of Jupiter, pressures jump to megabars, or one million bars, Fletcher said. On top of those enormous pressures, temperatures also rise into the tens of thousands of Kelvins, which is equivalent to tens of thousands of degrees Celsius.

At that point, any spacecraft wouldn't be just squished or melted — it would entirely disintegrate into its constituent atoms , Fletcher said. First, the ideal gas giant probe would have to be shaped like a bullet, to improve aerodynamics and allow it to plummet as far down as possible, Fletcher said. As the spacecraft started its descent, it would encounter wispy ammonia clouds and potentially pass through blue skies, due to the same phenomenon of light scattering that occurs in Earth's atmosphere.

After passing through the "gunky, reddy brown" clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide, the spacecraft would reach about 50 miles 80 km deep, an area of "towering" cumulonimbus clouds , possibly lit up by massive lightning storms, Fletcher said. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation.

Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet. Not every gas giant in the solar system is like this, but they all also come with various other problems that would make it difficult for humans to visit up close.

Neptune, for instance, has the strongest winds in the solar system, reaching speeds of up 1, miles per hour. These denser materials could make it even harder for a spacecraft to plunge into these atmospheres, since the spacecraft would be damaged sooner.

For the time being, until we find out how to build a spacecraft using materials that could guard human astronauts from all these elements, any up-close exploration of the gas giants will have to be through robotic spacecraft.

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Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more. This one came out as being exceptionally massive - much more than we expected really. That's when we started to look into what could have caused that. When the researchers first looked at the object, they thought it might be a binary star. Its radius is about three-and-a-half times larger than Earth's but the planet is around 39 times more massive.

In this size range, the planet would be expected to have a significant component that's gas. Yet it has a density similar to Earth, appearing to be mostly rocky. The object, called TOI b, was found circling a star much like the Sun that's located light-years away. The core orbits so close to its parent star that a year is a mere 18 hours and its surface temperature is around 1,C.

Researchers aren't sure whether the core lost its atmosphere in a collision or just never developed one.