quote:
Originally posted by Tomgs:
Whats left of a gas giant once you take away all the gas?
quite a bit, actually. consider that the earth is a 'rock' world, but once you go 5 miles down you hit molten mantle. on a gas world, the sheer mass of the world will create enough gravatational heat and pressure to form a solid 'surface' and when the heat and pressure get too extreme, you are going to have a liquid core.
depending on the component elements though, there is a gotcha when you start stripping off the atmosphere. you might just relieve enough pressure to cause the surface to vaporize into gas again, and then you would have another layer of gas to strip off. it would be a sort of cascading problem.
at least thats what I recall from jr high science. its been quite a while.
someone more knowledgeable than me will have to speak up here, but I am not sure that you can HAVE huge style rock or ice worlds, because they would effectively be gas giants once they reach a certain size. that is, the atmosphere would be of such a volume that it would have to be classified as one.