Today I was asked the following question on my Ukrainian channel:
Recently I saw a picture of the complete structure of the planet Jupiter from the core to the upper layers. Question: How do scientists know for sure that the core is rocky, as well as the other layers of Jupiter. Has this planet been studied in such detail to accurately describe the composition? And how does one understand the composition of planets where no man/robot has set foot?
As the Japanese proverb says “you don’t have to cut yourself to see if the blade is sharp”, we don’t need to send humans or robots to Jupiter to draw conclusions about its structure, although manned or robotic missions to celestial bodies certainly provide much more information and are extremely useful in general. The question is probably about this picture (or a similar one):
But about the insides of Jupiter, we don’t know for sure that it has a rocky core. It may or may not be there. It probably does, but it’s not certain. Why do we think that? Because we try to understand how stars and planets are formed and in the case of Jupiter and other giant planets, the most likely picture of their origin is that at first it was an ordinary stone planet, the size of Mars or maybe even our Earth, and then it began to collect by its gravity more and more gas from the…
