Ice giant

An ice giant is a giant planet composed mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. There are two ice giants in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune.Solar System → Local Interstellar Cloud → Local Bubble → Gould Belt → Orion Arm → Milky Way → Milky Way subgroup → Local Group → Local Sheet → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster → Observable universe → UniverseEach arrow (→) may be read as 'within' or 'part of'. An ice giant is a giant planet composed mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. There are two ice giants in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune. In astrophysics and planetary science the term 'ices' refers to volatile chemical compounds with freezing points above about 100 K, such as water, ammonia, or methane, with freezing points of 273 K, 195 K, and 91 K, respectively (see Volatiles). In the 1990s, it was realized that Uranus and Neptune are a distinct class of giant planet, separate from the other giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn. They have become known as ice giants. Their constituent compounds were solids when they were primarily incorporated into the planets during their formation, either directly in the form of ices or trapped in water ice. Today, very little of the water in Uranus and Neptune remains in the form of ice. Instead, water primarily exists as supercritical fluid at the temperatures and pressures within them. Ice giants consist of only about 20% hydrogen and helium in mass, as opposed to the Solar System's gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, which are both more than 90% hydrogen and helium in mass. In 1952, science fiction writer James Blish coined the term gas giant and it was used to refer to the large non-terrestrial planets of the Solar System. However, since the late 1940s the compositions of Uranus and Neptune have been understood to be significantly different from those of Jupiter and Saturn. They are primarily composed of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, constituting a separate type of giant planet altogether. Because during their formation Uranus and Neptune incorporated their material as either ices or gas trapped in water ice, the term ice giant came into use. In the early 1970s, the terminology became popular in the science fiction community, e.g., Bova (1971), but the earliest scientific usage of the terminology was likely by Dunne & Burgess (1978) in a NASA report. Modelling the formation of the terrestrial and gas giants is relatively straightforward and uncontroversial. The terrestrial planets of the Solar System are widely understood to have formed through collisional accumulation of planetesimals within the protoplanetary disc. The gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, and their extrasolar counterpart planets—are thought to have formed after solid cores around 10 Earth masses (M⊕) formed through the same process, while accreting gaseous envelopes from the surrounding solar nebula over the course of a few to several million years (Ma), although alternative models of core formation based on pebble accretion have recently been proposed. Some extrasolar giant planets may instead have formed via gravitational disk instabilities. The formation of Uranus and Neptune through a similar process of core accretion is far more problematic. The escape velocity for the small protoplanets about 20 astronomical units (AU) from the centre of the Solar System would have been comparable to their relative velocities. Such bodies crossing the orbits of Saturn or Jupiter would have been liable to be sent on hyperbolic trajectories ejecting them from the system. Such bodies, being swept up by the gas giants, would also have been likely to just be accreted into the larger planets or thrown into cometary orbits. In spite of the trouble modelling their formation, many ice giant candidates have been observed orbiting other stars since 2004. This indicates that they may be common in the Milky Way. Considering the orbital challenges of protoplanets 20 AU or more from the centre of the Solar System would experience, a simple solution is that the ice giants formed between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn before being gravitationally scattered outward to their now more distant orbits. Gravitational instability of the protoplanetary disk could also produce several gas giant protoplanets out to distances of up to 30 AU. Regions of slightly higher density in the disk could lead to the formation of clumps that eventually collapse to planetary densities. A disk with even marginal gravitational instability could yield protoplanets between 10 and 30 AU in over one thousand years (ka). This is much shorter than the 100,000 to 1,000,000 years required to produce protoplanets through core accretion of the cloud and could make it viable in even the shortest-lived disks, which exist for only a few million years.