Imagine stepping off the edge of reality and plunging into an endless abyss. No ground beneath you, no air to breathe, just a descent into a world so alien, so extreme, that every moment defies what we know about survival. Now, imagine that abyss is Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, a gas giant so immense that more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside it.
But, what would really happen if you deep dived right into Jupiter? Would you pass through its endless atmosphere and then pop out the other side, or would you eventually hit something solid? Would you be crushed, burned, or lost in a place where the laws of physics bend in ways that are totally unfamiliar here on Earth?
Hold your breath, because this ‘Bizarre But True!’ journey isn’t for the faint hearted…!
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Let’s begin with you standing on the edge of space looking down towards Jupiter, ready to dive in. First, you’ll begin a fall towards the edge of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, plummeting at a breathtaking speed of 110,000 miles an hour, (or 180,000 kilometres per hour). That’s over 15 times faster than a skydiver would fall on Earth! But don’t expect a smooth ride down, because Jupiter’s upper atmosphere’s a storm-ravaged nightmare, filled with ammonia clouds swirling at nearly 300 mile an hour speeds. It’s like free-falling into an endless hurricane, surrounded by flashes of lightning, ten times more powerful than anything on Earth.
At about 150 miles down, you’ll enter the first thick layer of ammonia clouds. It’s freezing! Already around -150 degrees Celsius (or -240 degrees Fahrenheit). The sunlight that once lit your way down is beginning to fade already, filtering weakly through the dense atmosphere. The winds scream around you, pushing and pulling as you descend deeper into the gas giant’s grip.
Drop another 75 miles and you’ll reach a place no human-made probe has ever survived before. The Galileo spacecraft made it this far in 1995 before Jupiter’s crushing pressure tore it apart. Here, the pressure’s a thousand times what you’d experience at sea level on Earth. Your lungs would collapse instantly…if the ammonia and hydrogen hadn’t already choked you first.
But let’s say you’ve got the most advanced spacesuit imaginable, built to withstand the unimaginable. You’ll keep falling, deeper and deeper, as the sky around you darkens to an inky black. You’re now surrounded by a second layer of clouds. Vast, roiling formations of ammonium hydrosulphide. These aren’t just storm clouds, they’re planetary titans, stretching across thousands of miles and sparking violent lightning storms that crackle and boom like celestial fireworks.
By the time you hit the 3,000 mile mark the temperature has risen dramatically. It’s no longer freezing. In fact, it’s warm. Almost comfortable, if you ignore the crushing pressure that’s now ten times higher than at the bottom of the Earth’s deepest ocean trenches, that is. But there’s still no solid ground beneath you. Just an endless abyss of thickening gases.
And then something strange happens…
As you fall further and further, you notice that the atmosphere around you starts to change. It no longer behaves like air, but it’s not quite liquid either. You’ve just entered Jupiter’s supercritical zone. This area’s a bizarre state of matter that’s neither fully gas nor fully liquid either. Here, the hydrogen you’ve been falling through for hours thickens into something you can almost swim through. If you weren’t being dragged down by Jupiter’s intense gravity, you might just float indefinitely in this strange, swirling semi-ocean of hydrogen.
But you don’t stop. You keep falling…
The pressure’s now over 2 million times what it was when you started your deep dive. The hydrogen around you now begins to act like a metal, conducting electricity and generating the colossal magnetic fields that make Jupiter one of the most magnetically powerful objects in the whole solar system. Your surroundings start to glow a dull red from the intense heat, now even hotter than the surface of the Sun.
And still, there’s no ground in sight…
By this point, you’ve been falling for hours, maybe even days. You’ve passed the point where any known material could survive. Even the toughest spacecraft would have been torn apart long ago. But somehow, you press on, plunging deeper into the unknown.
And then, finally, you hit something! Or at least, you think you do. Deep at the heart of Jupiter, over 20,000 miles down, you’ll reach what scientists believe is a solid core.
But calling it “solid” doesn’t quite do it justice. This isn’t rock as we know it. It’s a dense, compressed mass of metals, rock and exotic ices, all crushed under 25 MILLION atmospheres of pressure. If you could somehow stand here, you’d be standing on a mass 25 times heavier than Earth itself!
But, of course, you won’t be standing. Because at these temperatures, over 10,000 degrees Celsius (or 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit) even the toughest of materials would vaporise instantly. The core of Jupiter is a place of unimaginable extremes, where the very nature of matter bends and warps under the planet’s crushing gravity.
So what happens now? The truth is, we don’t really know…
Do you sink into the core, merging with Jupiter itself? Do you get trapped in an endless, swirling cycle, caught in the planet’s violent interior storms? Or does Jupiter, unwilling to let you go, hold you forever in its burning, high-pressure embrace?
One thing is for certain, you won’t be coming back! Jupiter’s a planet where the normal rules we’re used to here on Earth just don’t apply. And once you’ve fallen in, there’s no way out…
So maybe, just maybe, we should leave Jupiter as it is – an awe-inspiring and distant giant, too vast, too dangerous and too beautiful for us to properly get close to…
