How Can Jupiter Have No Surface? A Look at the Planet That Could Swallow 1,000 Earths

"If Jupiter doesn’t have a surface, what does it have? "

By Benjamin Roulston, Clarkson University
Nov 7, 2024 5:00 PMNov 7, 2024 5:17 PM
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A photo of Jupiter taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in September 2023. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, image processing by Tanya Oleksuik

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The planet Jupiter has no solid ground – no surface like the grass or dirt you tread here on Earth. There’s nothing to walk on, and no place to land a spaceship.

But how can that be? If Jupiter doesn’t have a surface, what does it have? How can it hold together?

Even as a professor of physics who studies all kinds of unusual phenomena, I realize the concept of a world without a surface is difficult to fathom. Yet much about Jupiter remains a mystery, even as NASA’s robotic probe Juno begins its ninth year orbiting this strange planet.

Jupiter’s mass is two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined.

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