Gas Giants Quotes

What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.

Earlier generations of stars in the galaxy could well have had planets. But really, there was only hydrogen and helium to work with, so they'd all be gas giants and not small, rocky planets.

Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.

No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.

55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.

As you go further from the sun, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are each colder in their upper atmosphere. But when you get to Neptune, it's just as warm as Uranus.

The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.

In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.