I'm not a physicist but I've long suspected that Jupiter has a metallic hydrogen core.
I'm not a physicist but I've long suspected that Jupiter has a metallic hydrogen core.
Lower mass elements would be displaced by higher mass elements like uranium, thorium, gold, platinum, etc...
Well you might want to go over to wikipedia and correct the articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_core
Like I said, I am not a I'm not a physicist or astrophysicist, I am just a software engineer. But in 2017 when I attempted to model the interior of gas giants... my model predicted a core surrounded by high density regions. The model resembled a close-packed lattice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres
I was just playing around with math so I am probably wrong.
Best Wishes, -David Delaune
Its abundance on a given body is a function of that overall abundance, and the gravitational pull of the body in question. At Earth's mass, free hydrogen (and helium) don't persist as the molecular speed exceeds Earth's escape velocity, and these gasses gradually bleed off into space.
(The Earth is thought to have lost about a quarter of its original water through this mechanism over 4.5 billion years.)
At Jupiter's scale, its ability to hold on to hydrogen, and the overall prevalence, dominates. Yes, there's probably some dense rocky / metallic core at the absolute centre, but Jupiter's core itself is thought to be substantially composed of extremely high-pressure hydrogen.
Why that's thought is an interesting question, though my understanding is that it's largely based on Jupiter's known diameter, its known mass (determinable through orbits of its moons), and chemical properties (including density). This is conjecture and may be wrong.