I liked this one too: All land masses in our solar system on one map https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/993770636441989120
Sad!
Look up the work of Gerard K. O'Neill or John S. Lewis for details.
* Gas, mostly helium and hydrogen with trace amounts of other gases
* Cloud layers of ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, and water.
* More gaseous hydrogen and helium, lots and lots of it
* Hydrogen and helium in the form of supercritical fluid. Above the critical point there are no distinct liquid or gas phases.
* A thick layer of liquid metallic hydrogen. Really exotic phase of matter; huge currents flowing through it are thought to cause Jupiter’s extreme magnetic field.
* Finally, a solid core of some sort, not much is known about it. At those pressures and temperatures it must be pretty exotic. It may not have a well-defined boundary; hot metallic hydrogen is thought to be a ridiculously good solvent.
Uranus and Neptune are different; they're usually referred to as "ice giants" these days. Beneath the atmosphere they are thought to have a thick mantle made of various exotic hot ices (mostly water, ammonia, and methane), and beneath that a small silicate/iron-nickel core.
It makes sense from the periodic table, but I really didn't know this existed. Very cool!
I've seen a quick-and-dirty summary of how to think about bonds that goes like this:
- An ionic bond forms between two atoms, one of which has too many electrons and one of which has too few. They balance.
- A covalent bond forms between two atoms, both of which have too few electrons. Some electrons are shared between both atoms simultaneously, bringing each up to quota through the simple magic of double-counting.
- A metallic bond forms "between" some number of atoms which all have too many electrons. The surplus electrons roam back and forth freely around the metal because their home atoms would prefer them to go away, allowing the metal to carry electric current.
This model is supposed to explain why you can basically combine arbitrary metals in arbitrary ratios and still get a metal.
It also seems like it predicts the existence of metallic hydrogen, in that a normal H ion is positive. Does that actually make sense?
The allotrope of solid water we're familiar with is called ice I_h (Roman numeral "I" followed by subscript "h" for "hexagonal"). It has the interesting and vital property of being less dense than liquid water and thus you cannot get ice I_h by compressing water. But there are many other, more exotic phases of ice, most of which are denser than liquid water and can thus form under extreme pressures. Indeed, in a sense they're not that exotic after all, seeing that almost all the water in the Solar System is in the form of high-pressure ices!