Welcome back everyone.
So now that we're further out in the solar system, it's time for us to unpack a bit
more the difference between the different kinds of giant planets.
So there are gas giants and ice giants, and we want to sort of distinguish between
them in our understanding of both our own solar system and other solar systems.
So in our solar system, the gas giants are Jupiter and Saturn.
And if we could peel them like an onion,
what we'd see is that they are composed mainly of hydrogen and helium.
And as you dive inward, what you'd find is that there is essentially no place to
stand and the atmosphere smoothly merges into a hydrogen ocean essentially.
And it's a metallic hydrogen ocean, the forces,
the pressures that hydrogen experiences as you dive down into the gas giants is
really quite extreme, unlike anything that we experience here on Earth.
And those forces, the inter-atomic forces, can change the phase or
the behavior of the gas such that it begins to act like not only a liquid,
but also a liquid metal.
So that's really one of the interesting things about the gas giants as you go
deep into them.
If you go very deep, you'll eventually reach the core.
And the core is essentially, sometimes people think about the core being a rocky
core, but really what it is, is it's a ball of metals, perhaps we think, at very,
very high temperatures and pressures.
Now because of the metallic hydrogen and
also perhaps the core of metals in the gas giants, both Jupiter and
Saturn have very strong magnetic fields, extremely strong magnetic fields,
on the order of 20,000 to 500 times the magnetic field of Earth.
That's for Jupiter and Saturn, respectively.
Now these magnetic fields are so large, particularly for Jupiter,
that it actually, the magnetic field extends all the way out through
