Jupiter's environment is probably not conducive to life as we know it. The temperatures, pressures, and materials that characterize this planet are most likely too extreme and volatile for organisms to adapt to.
Jupiter is made of mostly hydrogen and helium gas. So, trying to land on it would be like trying to land on a cloud here on Earth. There's no outer crust to break your fall on Jupiter. Just an endless stretch of atmosphere.
Without Jupiter, the Earth would be pummeled by impacts from asteroids and comets, rendering our planet utterly uninhabitable.
Jupiter. Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface, but its atmosphere contains water vapor. Jupiter's moons harbor a lot of ice in many forms. Ganymede has water ice on the surface, and likely has a large ocean of salty liquid water deep in the subsurface.
Their abundances in the deep (below 10 bar) troposphere imply that the atmosphere of Jupiter is enriched in the elements carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and possibly oxygen by a factor of 2–4 relative to the Sun.
Problem 3 – Which planet has the atmosphere with the greatest percentage of Oxygen? Answer: From the table we see that Mercury has the greatest percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere.
Jupiter is 90% hydrogen1, with 10% helium and a sprinkle of all the other elements. In the gas giant's outer layers, hydrogen is a gas just like on Earth. As you go deeper, intense atmospheric pressure gradually turns the gas into a dense fluid.
Thus, Titan could potentially harbor environments with conditions suitable for life—meaning both life as we know it (in the subsurface ocean) and life as we don't know it (in the hydrocarbon liquid on the surface).
Europa's surface is blasted by radiation from Jupiter. That's a bad thing for life on the surface – it couldn't survive. But the radiation may create fuel for life in an ocean below the surface. The radiation splits apart water molecules (H2O, made of oxygen and hydrogen) in Europa's extremely tenuous atmosphere.
Flexi Says: Right now and for the foreseeable future, humans can only live on Earth. Humans have not traveled very far into space. The Moon is the only other place humans have visited. No other planet in our solar system currently has the conditions to support life as we know it on Earth.
While Jupiter often protects Earth and the other inner planets by deflecting comets and asteroids, sometimes it sends objects on a collision course straight toward the inner planets.
Meanwhile, as meteoroids infiltrate the rings, they push material within the innermost rings toward Saturn at a rapid rate. Cassini observed that the rings were losing many tons of mass per second, which means the rings don't have much time left, astronomically speaking.
“We could build a spacecraft... and send it to Enceladus to answer the question: is this habitable place actually inhabited or not?”
Uranus' environment is not conducive to life as we know it. The temperatures, pressures, and materials that characterize this planet are most likely too extreme and volatile for organisms to adapt to.
The primary reason that humans cannot walk or stand on the surface of Uranus is that the surface isn't solid. Most of Uranus underneath its gaseous atmosphere appears to be composed of a slushy mixture of water, methane, and ammonia. Some of these materials are in their ice form.
Tough Place for Life
It is unlikely that life as we know it could survive on Mercury due to solar radiation, and extreme temperatures.
Mars is hundreds of degrees colder than Earth; it has a hundred times less atmosphere and that atmosphere has hardly any oxygen. But there may be other forms of life that could have evolved that aren't very much like us but are very much like the early forms of life that evolved on Earth.
Mars is believed to have lost its water when it lost its magnetic field around 4 billion years ago. Without an atmosphere, there was nothing to prevent Mars' water from evaporating and then being lost to space. This radiation also made the existence of life at the surface of Mars unfeasible.
Research suggests that deep biospheres like that of Earth are possible. The strongest candidates therefore are currently icy satellites such as those of Jupiter and Saturn—Europa and Enceladus respectively, in which subsurface liquid water is thought to exist.
The surface of Pluto is extremely cold, so it seems unlikely that life could exist there. At such cold temperatures, water, which is vital for life as we know it, is essentially rock-like. Pluto's interior is warmer, however, and some think there could even be an ocean deep inside.
is based on water. And while the atmo- spheric pressure on Titan is moderate—1.5 times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, about what divers experience 15 feet under- water—there is no oxygen in it.
Saturn's environment is not conducive to life as we know it. The temperatures, pressures, and materials that characterize this planet are most likely too extreme and volatile for organisms to adapt to.
Earth might once have been a gas giant, a planet mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. The traditional view of planet formation is of a gas cloud collapsing, fragmenting and condensing into planets, with gas giants generally forming far away from the star where more volatile compounds are found.
No one knows exactly how hot, but scientists think it could be about 43,000°F (24,000°C) near Jupiter's center, or core. Jupiter is made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
So, Jupiter cannot and will not spontaneously become a star, but if a minimum of 13 extra Jupiter-mass objects happen to collide with it, there is a chance it will.