Jupiter is made of gas with no solid surface, so would we keep falling to the centre if we fall into it?
It’s a little more complicated than that. Let’s take a 200 lb (90 kg) you falling into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter’s gravity is 2.4 times Earth’s, so you would shed 2.4 times as much energy on re-entry as on earth. That would make a nice fireball when it got a few miles into atmosphere. As you get into the atmosphere, both the temperature and pressure increase with depth. As the pressure and temperature increase, the atmosphere compresses, So the density would increase too. When you get several thousand miles down, the atmosphere would reach your body density. Shortly after this point you would stop falling and start back up.
You would float on atmosphere squeezed into the consistency of syrup. At this temperature and pressure, even our scenario of your survivability breaks down and the carbon in your body could well be squeezed into diamonds. Diamonds are more dense than the human body, so they would continue down.
Over time, many rocks, asteroids, and comets have fallen into Jupiter’s gravitational grip. These would have formed into a ball at the center, but it is a ball with all the properties of a metallic gas. Most likely this gas is graded by density of the elements within it, and the vaporized carbon from your diamonds would float near the surface of this ball. Around the ball is a cloud of metallic hydrogen which is electrically conductive and most likely generates Jupiter’s magnet field. You would still be many miles from the center.
Credit: Keith Berry
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