Gas Giant Formation

So there are two theories for how the gas giants are formed. One is the same theory that I showed you just now - core creation. 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 not that the gas giants also have a metallic core, but maybe the metallic core is 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 the pressure we can get in the lab, the closer we can get to understanding the interiors of the gas giants and the exoplanet that are so big.