TWO teams are racing to reach the core of Jupiter. Not by actually boring into the giant planet, but by squeezing hydrogen to incredibly high pressures to simulate what’s it’s like there. The results could tell us the maximum possible size of a planet like Jupiter—if only the two teams could agree on what they mean.
Jupiter is made mainly of hydrogen, and in the centre of the planet it is crushed by pressures millions of times the air pressure on Earth. Under these conditions, physicists reckon hydrogen should behave like a liquid metal. But no one has been…
