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A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. [1] Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System . The term "gas giant" was originally synonymous with " giant planet ".
A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet (Jove being another name for the Roman god Jupiter), is a diverse type of planet much larger than Earth. Giant planets are usually primarily composed of low-boiling point materials (), rather than rock or other solid matter, but massive solid planets can also exist.
It is a gas giant with a mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Its diameter is eleven times that of Earth , and a tenth that of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm ), with an orbital period of 11.86 years .
The gas giants in our solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are much denser. This giant gas planet is as fluffy and puffy as cotton candy Skip to main content
[3] [4] [5] Gas giant cores are proportionally much smaller than those of terrestrial planets, though they can be considerably larger than the Earth's nevertheless; Jupiter's is 10–30 times heavier than Earth, [5] and exoplanet HD149026 b may have a core 100 times the mass of the Earth. [6]
Planets whose orbits lie outside the orbit of Earth. [nb 1] Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune: Trojan planet: A planet co-orbiting with another planet. The discovery of a pair of co-orbital exoplanets has been reported, but later retracted. [3] One possibility for the habitable zone is a trojan planet of a gas giant close to its star.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about nine times that of Earth. [27] [28] It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive.
A Mini-Neptune (sometimes known as a gas dwarf or transitional planet) is a planet less massive than Neptune but resembling Neptune in that it has a thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere, probably with deep layers of ice, rock or liquid oceans (made of water, ammonia, a mixture of both, or heavier volatiles).