Giant planets articles from across Nature Portfolio

Laser-driven shock compression experiments yield the melting curve of the superionic phase of ammonia at conditions relevant to the interiors of Uranus and Neptune.

Potential similarities between Jovian and Earth lightning are helpful to understand involved properties. Here, the authors show that the Jovian lightning initiation processes are similar to those of intracloud lightning at Earth.

Torsional waves extend into the deep interior of Jupiter where they can modulate the outgoing heat flux and couple with Jupiter’s weather layer to generate the observed quasi-periodic oscillations in the cloud deck. Such waves can be used to explore the interior structure of gas giants.

Observations from the JWST show the presence of a spectral absorption feature at 4.05 μm arising from SO₂ in the atmosphere of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-39b, which is produced by photochemical processes and verified by numerical models.

A diffusion model of Jupiter’s troposphere with updated thermochemistry can explain the upper tropospheric CO observations if the deep oxygen abundance is subsolar. Alternatively, to reproduce Juno’s supersolar deep oxygen abundances, a deep layer of reduced vertical mixing is necessary.

Magnesium Oxide and water are abundant in the interior of planets. Here, the authors predict three new MgO-H₂O compounds: Mg₂O₃H₂, MgO₃H₄ and MgO₄H₆, and they exhibit superionic behavior in planetary interior conditions.