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Asked by Bartosz to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 8 Nov 2017.
Question: Can terrestrial planets become Gas giants
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Ry Cutter answered on 8 Nov 2017:
If you put enough gas around a little rocky planet it could become a gas giant. It would do this by pulling in all the gas with its gravity.
Chances are that won’t happen in our solar system as there all the extra gas has been used up to make the Sun, Saturn, and Jupiter.Good Question,
Ryan
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Daniel Williams answered on 8 Nov 2017:
The terrestrial planets of our solar system almost certainly couldn’t come gas giants. That’s because they don’t have a strong enough gravitational pull to hold the amount of gas that being a gas giant would require against the force of the “solar wind”, which is a stream of fast moving particles from the sun. Those basically blow gas away from planets. You can see that with Mercury, which is the smallest terrestrial planet, and the one closest to the sun. This means it both has the weakest gravitational pull and suffers the strongest solar wind. It has almost no atmosphere at all. The temperature of the gas also gives it energy and on small planets that can let it escape.
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Maggie Lieu answered on 8 Nov 2017:
Not really, gas giants are outer solar system objects and when they formed from the debris disk, they were accreting so much more material than the inner solar system planets. This means they grew very big, very fast. Theres not much material left in the solar system to accrete so its unlikely the terrestrial planets will grow anymore than they are now.
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Hannah Middleton answered on 8 Nov 2017:
An established terrestrial planet in a solar system like ours would be unlikely to form a gas giant – there’s not enough material around for it to grow. But whether the gas giants start out their lives as rocky bodies and then pick up gas, or it they form straight from gas is still uncertain.
At the early stages of planet formation, there is what’s called a proto-planetary disk. This is a disk of dust and gas around a young or newly forming star. Over time the dust and gas in the disk can start to clump together due to gravity, and begin to form planets. So it might be that the gas giants started out like the terrestrial planets did as rocky cores, but just kept gathering material and gas, but there no-one knows for sure how the planets formed. There have been some recent observations made of other solar systems in the early stages of formation, and hopefully more can be learnt about how they form by looking at systems like those.
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