Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/10/cool-nasa-illustrations-of-jup.html
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so I wonder what eventually you get to as you travel down into Jupiter. Gas giant, but yet somewhere in the middle the gravity must be crushing everything into a “solid” state? Is there a ground surface somewhere down there?
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It’s an open question. Theories range from a moon-sized kernel of diamond at the center to increasingly dense and exotic fluids of materials that would be solid if not for the unfathomable pressure of the atmosphere.
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You mean like an ocean of free electrons stripped from their molecule’s nucleus.
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Sort of. One theory is that the core or a layer around the core is metallic hydrogen and.or helium.
Bear in mind, that’s just one theory.
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(checks my story about a woman base jumping from orbit into Jupiter’s atmosphere)
Fuck.
(rewrite incoming)
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I would read that.
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I hate to be a pedant here but a base jump onto Jupiter can’t reasonably be equated to a space jump from the visualization that @MadLibrarian provided - sorry I haven’t heard of this Star Treck documentary.
I would suggest that there are purely physical issues alone that would compromise the way a para-glider would survive the “mushballs”.
So it’s all metal? Cool.
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Oh sure, I didn’t view the Star Trek scene as relating much to what I wrote. There are other considerations to jumping into Jupiter’s atmosphere that Kirk and Sulu didn’t have to deal with on Vulcan. But those damn mushballs might complicate my original descriptions, so I’ll have to review the latest research and see if I need to modify.
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For an example of a really good SF treatment of journeying through a Jovian type atmosphere, I highly recommend The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks.
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