Does gas giants have "habitable zones"?

[ReptilianGameplays]

It might be a foolish question (I guess).

But does the gas giants have "habitable zones"?

Not like hot, good and cold. (Or maybe yes)

But like instable, good and not landing worthy.

[Monkeh]

The amount of stuff inside Jupiter is a very large number. The range of temperatures found if you were to fall all the way from the outer, wispy atmosphere to the dense core is another large number. Somewhere inside Jupiter there will be an onion like layer of water vapour or even liquid water. It will be in some kind of state that depends on the temperature and pressures at that level of atmosphere, but it's bound to be there.

A spherical onion layer of liquid water with organic volatiles from the many, many asteroid and comet impacts, means there could even be an ecosystem living away in there. It's a possibility I tellz yer!

Edited September 16, 2013 by Monkeh

[EuSouONumero345]

They're made of gas, have a giant gravity, so they would colapse everything, and(if you survive, which is impossible), you will descend until reach an small rocky object, the planet core.

[Monkeh]

I believe the current thinking has the core of these monsters as some kind of weird metallic state of matter not really found anywhere else. It's kind of a liquid but has mettalic properties...or something, can't remember fully, but simple rocks it sure isn't. Too much heat and pressure.

[lajoswinkler]

a) There are no ordinary liquid layers in gas giants. Pressures and temperatures grow at such rates that every constituent of its atmosphere reaches critical points where matter is indistinguishable from gas and liquid. Going even deeper, the conditions are just more dense and more hot, but there is no boundary. It's just thicker and thicker supercritical fluid.

One exception might be metallic hydrogen, but that's a degenerate state of matter and we don't know much about it.

Ice giants, same thing. "Ice" doesn't mean there's any actual ice inside. Ice is a term planetary geology uses for volatile materials such as ammonia, water, nitrogen, hydrocarbons, etc. State of matter is unimportant - ice means type of chemical compound, that's all.

Uranus and Neptune contain almost identical hell inside, except the amounts of ices are a bit elevated compared to Jupiter and Saturn, hence the bluish colors. It's still close to the "trace" amounts.

All our gas giants are mostly hydrogen with some helium. Their cores should contain every element Earth already contains. Iron, nickel, oxygen, aluminium, uranium, chlorine, sodium, you name it. Temperatures and pressures are greater than what's in Earth's center. It's degenerate matter akin to plasma, but it's still called rocky, because rock is a term planetary geologists use for heavy elements like iron.

Conclusion - after the initial falling through whispy clouds of ices in perpetual balance of sublimation and deposition, probe going deeper and deeper into the bowels of any gas giant will experience only increasing temperature and pressure. (Actually Jool now has something like that, the other day I've measured close to 1000°C deep inside.)

Nobody knows about the visual transparency of that hell, or any optical qualities. Nobody knows is there a complete darkness for the human eyes. I suppose there is a thick layer of darkness, and then when the temperatures reach sufficient values, human eye would see increasing red glow. Venus and Titan have gloomy surfaces and their atmospheres are very thin compared to gas giants. After few hundred kilometres, it's darkness.

Edited September 16, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[jwenting]

and even if there was liquid water, the radiation levels would be so high as to make life as we know it impossible.

Of course it's possible something could have evolved there that is based on nothing we can yet conceive, but I'm not holding my breath.

[lajoswinkler]

Nothing can evolve in Jupiter clouds. It's gaseous environment at the depths where the temperature is convenient for organic chemistry, and in the upper layers where ices form aerosols, it's freakishly cold, so particles are either too separate to interact well enough, or their movement is too slow. Life requires liquid environment to form.

I've seen those ideas and concept art with living sacks floating in Jupiter. Pipedreams.

[chrischambers]

the real question is that no one knows, untill we go there and send in probels that are looking for organic life.

[lajoswinkler]

We don't literally know what's 5000 km below Earth's surface, but we have calculated the conditions. If we took only our eyes for evidence, science would be a wasteland of human knowledge. Not everything needs to be literally seen, and even then, senses can fool us.

[thereaverofdarkness]

a) There are no ordinary liquid layers in gas giants. Pressures and temperatures grow at such rates that every constituent of its atmosphere reaches critical points where matter is indistinguishable from gas and liquid.

That depends on the temperature at the liquid/gas boundary. If it is below the triple point, there will be a firm boundary in which the surface tension of liquid meets the thin gas. Since they are the same material, however, you might have enormous wave crests that evaporate as they rise into the gas, while their troughs draw gas downward and cause it to condense into liquid. That is most likely to happen very near (but slightly below) the triple point in temperature, and would be a grand sight to behold!

[Anton P. Nym]

We have to be careful about saying life couldn't exist in Jupiter's atmosphere. After all, we all "knew" that the sunless bottoms of the deep ocean couldn't possibly support life because there was no sunlight to support photosynthesis... until we found those chemosynthetic ecosystems around "black smokers" in the late '70s. (And, now that I look it up, apparently they found some species of bacteria that could photosynthesise with the blackbody glow from those thermal vents. Amazing.)

I agree that the odds are long against there being life there, but there's still a chance.

As for a human-habitable zone, well, no... not that a human being could get to one thanks to the radiation belts created by the Jovian magnetosphere.

-- Steve

[Pds314]

1: Objects don't necessarily sink infinitely into Gas giants, since they contain layers of super-critical fluids and such which would provide buoyancy.

2: Radiation is not probably relevant except on the dense crust of heavy metals that may form above the liquid metallic hydrogen.

3: Gasses would probably be stacked in such a way as to make them have liquid layers of substances like methane and water and and whatnot. These would be organized in order of compressed density, but would be organized roughly by molecular weight when not fully compressed. There may be some substances, e.g. methane, which can exist in liquid or solid form deep down, and gas form near the cloud-top, but do not exist in-between. Therefore, it may be possible for two likely completely seperate regions to evolve life, one which is in the thick atmosphere and is limited to gaseous matter, and another which lives deep in an organic ocean and chooses not to venture very far upward or downward due to the lack of food and the toxicity of the environment (e.g., something from the water layer dares not enter the alcohol layer).

[Pds314]

In fact, it may be possible for life to evolve on one of the solid surfaces under one of the oceans, obviously, some substances, such as silicon, water, etc simply don't solidify down there, but metals and most organic materials certainly could. The physics there would be very odd, if such life gained sentience, it would be unlikely to identify the concept of a perfect vacuum for a long time, CRTs would never be invented, and in fact would not be very useful as eyes would be useless in the murky depths of rubble-pile organic dirt and metal on top of possibly just a lower ocean of a liquid denser than the solid, picture what would happen to mercury, it would be below the crust, but then uranium would be below even that.

Sonar would be critical to any life that did exist there, and guns would be basically useless due to the fact that the bottom layer of ocean would likely be highly viscous.

Light may be discovered only after advanced thermodynamics, vacuum, etc are discovered, the fact that their world is a rapidly spinning sphere could take a long time as well because the only noticeable effects would be the Coriolis force or odd sonar effects.

[beck]

You should all read Clark's "Encounter with Medusa". The story features the use of a hot air balloon to explore Jupiter.