Gas Giants

So there are two theories for how the gas giants formed. One is the same theory I showed you just now core accretion, right. And the other is called disk instability and one of our colleagues at DTM has done a lot of work on that and so it's unclear exactly how they formed but you're right what we're trying to do the reason we're trying to get the higher and higher pressure in the lab is because we are trying to understand more about the pressure inside the gas giants. It's thought that the gas giants also have a metallic core, but maybe the metallic core not made of iron. Hydrogen, for example becomes metallic at a certain pressure. So it's very possible that the insides of these planets could have metallic cores, could have hydrogen cores, could have rocky portions we're not sure. But the higher pressure we can get in the lab, the closer we can get understanding the interiors of the gas giants and the exoplanet that are so big.