Surprise facts about the helium rain on Jupiter

New research shows that helium rain can wash neon from Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Saturn is smaller and colder than Jupiter, and physicists expect that helium rain will be even more common.

A view in Physics by Simon Billinge of Columbia University said that Jupiter is like the Sun mainly hydrogen and helium.

Jupiter is a homogeneous mixture of hydrogen and helium.

And it is even richer than the Sun in six elements, neon accounting for 1/600 the mass of the Solar System, which only accounts for 1/6 of the mass of Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

Astronomers believe that Jupiter is a homogeneous mixture of hydrogen and helium. Some physicists think that neon has somehow sunk out of Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

Astronomers from the University of California Berkeley solved this mystery. Using quantum computer simulations of hot gases deep inside the giant planet, he pointed out that there must be a layer of atmosphere where helium condenses into droplets instead of mixing with hydrogen.

Neon dissolves into these droplets, gradually falling below the planet out of the atmosphere in the form of helium rain . Simulations not only explain a long-standing mystery, but also hint at what might happen inside other planets.