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The Biggest Ocean In The Solar System
Beneath the 50-kilometer-thick (31 mi) destructive clouds of Jupiter lies a mammoth ocean of liquid hydrogen. Making up a whopping 78 percent of the planet’s radius, the ocean is 54,531 kilometers (33,884 mi) deep.
To put that into perspective, the deepest point of Earth’s ocean is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which lies at a scant 11 kilometers (7 mi) below the surface. But it’s not just the sheer size of the ocean that’s totally incomprehensible; it’s the conditions under which it exists.
In order to convert the hydrogen gas into a liquid, you need to compress it with an insane amount of pressure; 100 million times that of Earth’s atmospheric pressure should do it. Under these conditions, the liquid hydrogen inside Jupiter takes on a profound characteristic and becomes something called liquid metallic hydrogen.
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