THE INTERIORS OF GIANT PLANETS: Models and Outstanding Questions

2001

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

▪ Abstract We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what their composition is, how various processes influence their structure and evolution, and most importantly how they form. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune can be studied in detail, mostly from close spacecraft flybys. We can infer that they are all enriched in heavy elements compared to the Sun, with the relative global enrichments increasing with distance to the Sun. We can also infer that they possess dense cores of varied masses. The intercomparison of presently characterized extrasolar giant planets shows that they are also mainly made of hydrogen and helium, but that they either have significantly different amounts of heavy elements, have had different orbital evolutions, or both. Hence, many questions remain and need to be answered to make significant progress on the origins of planets...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8efafa303fc6a928af2360efd1cf5b652ad59567

Citations in the corpus

• Melting temperature of diamond at ultrahigh pressure (2010, unknown): “It is now accepted that the high-pressure, high-temperature behaviour of carbon is essential to predicting the evolution and structure of such planet”
• The great dichotomy of the Solar System: Small terrestrial embryos and massive giant planet cores (2015, unknown): “However, there are several tens of Earth masses of “metals” (molecules heavier than H and He) in Jupiter (Guillot, 2005) and it is possible that part or even most of its primordial core has been eroded and dissolved into the atmosphere (Guillot et al., 2004; Wilson and Militzer, 2012).”
• Forming Planetesimals in Solar and Extrasolar Nebulae (2009, unknown): “This exercise is uncertain, since estimates of the total “metal” (non-H and non-He) content of Jupiter range from 10 to 42 M⊕; for Saturn the range is 15 to 30 M⊕ (Guillot 2005).”
• New constraints on Saturn’s interior from Cassini astrometric data (2015, unknown): “Even though this value is often used as the reference, it stands on physical assumptions and internal structure models that have since been improved (Guillot 1999, 2005; Hubbard et al., 2009; Kramm et al., 2011; Nettelmann et al., 2013; Helled & Guillot, 2013).”
• AB INITIO SIMULATIONS FOR MATERIAL PROPERTIES ALONG THE JUPITER ADIABAT (2012, unknown): “Fundamental questions are related to their formation, evolution, and present structures including internal flow dynamics and magnetic field generation (Stevenson 1982; Guillot 2005; Jones et al. 2011).”