[decimon]

I guess this wouldn't work in party balloons.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

With all that substance under the surface, Jupiter and Saturn would make a perfect president and vice-presidental nominee team for the Democratic party.

[the invisib1e hand]

fyi.

[editor-surveyor]

Sounds like BS to me.

Helium is an inert, and liquid helium doesn’t behave like a metal on Earth; its a nonconductor for starters.

[Doomonyou]

a liquid metal alloy.

That's where those terminator dudes come from.

[6SJ7]

This finding also speaks to one of the many mysteries of these large planets, Stixrude said. More energy is emitted from Jupiter and Saturn than they absorb from the sun, and scientists don't understand where it comes from.

I've read theories that Jupiter is a failed binary star. It's almost large enough to sustain fusion, but it missed it by that much.

[ETL]

Speaking of Jupiter, you can now see it easily by eye after sunset. It's currently rising (breaking the horizon) at around 6:15pm (eastern time, U.S.). In fact, it is so bright that you might think it's the headlight of an approaching airplane. Distance from Earth at this time: almost exactly 400 million miles.

Note: although it's 'rising' at around 6pm ET, depending on your viewing location (obstructions etc), it likely won't be high enough for you to see it for another hour or so.

A good website for rising and setting times for the planets, also for viewable International Space Station (ISS) passes, and there are currently some bright ones over parts of the United States, is Heavens-Above.com:
http://heavens-above.com/

Finally, Venus is just now beginning to emerge again as an "evening star". However, you probably won't be able to see it easily for another few weeks, when it moves more eastward of the Sun. At that time, look west after sunset for a spectacular white light. It will eventually be even brighter than Jupiter is at the moment.

[RJL]

A strange, metal brew lies buried deep within Jupiter and Saturn, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and in London.

How will they tie this to global warming?

[Centurion2000]

bump

[SunkenCiv]

Los Alamos Computers Probe How Giant Planets Formed
Science News
July 22, 2004

Working with a French colleague, Didier Saumon of Los Alamos' Applied Physics Division created models establishing that heavy elements are concentrated in Saturn's massive core, while those same elements are mixed throughout Jupiter, with very little or no central core at all. The study, published in this week's Astrophysical Journal, showed that refractory elements such as iron, silicon, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are concentrated in Saturn's core, but are diffused in Jupiter, leading to a hypothesis that they were formed through different processes. Saumon collected data from several recent shock compression experiments that have showed how hydrogen behaves at pressures a million times greater than atmospheric pressure, approaching those present in the gas giants. These experiments - performed over the past several years at U.S. national labs and in Russia - have for the first time permitted accurate measurements of the so-called equation of state of simple fluids, such as hydrogen, within the high-pressure and high-density realm where ionization occurs for deuterium, the isotope made of a hydrogen atom with an additional neutron. Working with T. Guillot of the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, France, Saumon developed about 50,000 different models of the internal structures of the two giant gaseous planets that included every possible variation permitted by astrophysical observations and laboratory experiments.

another oldie (probably requires registration):

The Centers of Planets
by Sandro Scandolo
and Raymond Jeanloz

Back in 1935, Eugene Wigner, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and at the time a professor at Princeton University, suggested that hydrogen, an inert molecular gas at ambient conditions, could turn into a metallic solid, similar to lithium or sodium, at sufficiently high pressure. Wigner's proposal implied a remarkable complexity for "element one," the simplest chemical entity, one electron bound to one proton... Jupiter's magnetic field, first measured by Voyager spacecraft, is ten times stronger than Earth's, and its pattern is considerably more complex. Part of this complexity could be accounted for if the source of the field lay much farther from the center, in relative terms, than does Earth's. Wigner's prediction of metallic hydrogen was based on a simplified analysis of the electronic ground state, but the pressure he calculated for the transition to the metallic state, about 250,000 atmospheres, corresponded to a depth of less than one-twentieth of the planetary radius of Jupiter. In other words, most of the solar system's largest gas giant had to be in a metallic state -- although the metallic hydrogen would have to be a fluid rather than a solid to provide dynamo action... The fact is that the Earth's core is not pure iron but contains about 10 percent (by weight) of other constituents. If you compare the density of the outer core that is derived from seismological data with that of pure iron shocked to comparable pressures and temperatures, the core's density turns out to be about 10 percent lower. Even when the melting temperature of pure iron is accurately known at 2 million to 4 million atmospheres of pressure, we will still have to make a correction for the effect of contaminants. Alloying often decreases the freezing temperature of a material; this is why ice can be melted by putting salt on top of it. The actual freezing temperature at the inner–outer core boundary may therefore be 1,000 kelvins or so lower than that of pure iron.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks decimon, and you're right! :')

Also see...

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[WilliamReading]

This makes no sense. If Saturn and Jupiter are made of helium, what is keeping them from both rising to the top of the solar system?

I would dismiss this out of hand.