I find Neptune to be utterly fascinating. Ever since I was a kid, I always felt this mysterious attraction to it, like a calling.
And I’m not just saying this because the latest Destiny 2 expansion takes place on Neptune.
I also only recently learned that Neptune is an “ice giant.”
Meaning that despite being primarily made of gas, the extreme atmospheric pressures and varied temperatures mean that the deeper you go into the planet, at a certain point that gasses become so compact that it becomes almost like a liquid mix, and that Neptune itself has a rocky core under thousands of miles of searing winds, methane, water ice, and raining diamonds.
Sorry but ice giants aren’t unique in having a liquid interior, gas giants do also, and in fact below the liquid H/He ocean there will be more phase transitions, with a solid, metallic phase of hydrogen at the bottom, and then a core probably made of diamond, or at the very least all the rocky and other heavy stuff that will have sunk down there over its history.
The name ‘ice giant’ is one of these stupid astronomical naming conventions that makes no sense to the rest of us, specifically ‘ices’ means ‘volatile’ chemical compounds like water, ammonia and methane, and an ice giant is composed primarily of elements heavier than H/He, but they won’t actually be in an ‘ice’ form like what we put in our drinks, as you say, there’ll be liquid oceans once the pressure gets high enough.
Well, they’re not really ‘liquid gas’ they’re just liquid, for me the metallic bit is the coolest thing. It’s kind of a holy grail of high energy chemistry to recreate that in the lab afaik. But I’m not a chemist so…
I find Neptune to be utterly fascinating. Ever since I was a kid, I always felt this mysterious attraction to it, like a calling.
And I’m not just saying this because the latest Destiny 2 expansion takes place on Neptune.
I also only recently learned that Neptune is an “ice giant.”
Meaning that despite being primarily made of gas, the extreme atmospheric pressures and varied temperatures mean that the deeper you go into the planet, at a certain point that gasses become so compact that it becomes almost like a liquid mix, and that Neptune itself has a rocky core under thousands of miles of searing winds, methane, water ice, and raining diamonds.
Sorry but ice giants aren’t unique in having a liquid interior, gas giants do also, and in fact below the liquid H/He ocean there will be more phase transitions, with a solid, metallic phase of hydrogen at the bottom, and then a core probably made of diamond, or at the very least all the rocky and other heavy stuff that will have sunk down there over its history.
The name ‘ice giant’ is one of these stupid astronomical naming conventions that makes no sense to the rest of us, specifically ‘ices’ means ‘volatile’ chemical compounds like water, ammonia and methane, and an ice giant is composed primarily of elements heavier than H/He, but they won’t actually be in an ‘ice’ form like what we put in our drinks, as you say, there’ll be liquid oceans once the pressure gets high enough.
I am aware that gas giants have rocky cores as well.
The idea of liquid oceans of gas is enthralling to me.
Well, they’re not really ‘liquid gas’ they’re just liquid, for me the metallic bit is the coolest thing. It’s kind of a holy grail of high energy chemistry to recreate that in the lab afaik. But I’m not a chemist so…