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Are all gas giants made of helium and hydrogen?
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2026
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Mostly, just because almost all matter in the universe is those two elements. However not always true. Uranus does have a very thick hydrogen and helium mixture in its atmosphere (80%/15%), but it also has a solid core, and technically by mass is mostly water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical ice phase.
It's bonkers how the universe is almost entirely H and He and yet, here we are.
Poetically it's been said that we are stardust, or star stuff. More grounded, we're the extremely minor byproducts of a star's explosion.
Carl Sagan famously said that from his 1980 television series “Cosmos”:
What I didn't realize at the time was, he probably made up that word to avoid using the word "stardust" that Joni Mitchell used in her song at Woodstock, which certainly had some influence on him.
If we want to get kind of nitpicky, water, ammonia, and methane are also mostly hydrogen
If we really get nitpicky, all the atoms in all of the elements are mostly made of empty space, aka nothing.
The whole universe is mostly nothing, just like the stars and plates too.
If we want to ~~keep the thread going~~ get even more nitpicky, empty space doesn't exist, exacly. There's just one big quantum field filling the universe.
Although, future physics may change that picture.