Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2: We are back with our second episode on the Great
Speaker 2: Red Spot of Jupiter, and in the last episode we'll
Speaker 2: get to sort of a rundown of what we talked
Speaker 2: about last time. But one of the things we did
Speaker 2: mention a few different times is how Jupiter does show
Speaker 2: up in science fiction, oftentimes just as a backdrop, sometimes
Speaker 2: in a more plot oriented fashion. But I was looking
Speaker 2: around because I'm like, Okay, if I dive deeper into
Speaker 2: written fiction, I'm sure there's some great hardcore Jupiter sci
Speaker 2: fi that references the spot. And sure enough, there's a
Speaker 2: novella from Let's See nineteen seventy one, I believe the
Speaker 2: original version of it published in Playboy magazine, and it's
Speaker 2: set in the year twenty fifty. It is titled A
Speaker 2: Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This
Speaker 3: is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it
Speaker 3: It is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a This is a pretty famous one.
Speaker 2: I've never read it, which is why it didn't, you know,
Speaker 2: come to my mind immediately, and we may have referenced
Speaker 2: it on the show in the past, but it was
Speaker 2: a big one, was a Nebula Award winner, highly influential tale.
Speaker 2: I wish I'd had a chance to read it in
Speaker 2: full ahead of our recording, but I did go through
Speaker 2: it and look for references to the Great Red Spot,
Speaker 2: and there are actually a couple of them. Is kind
Speaker 2: of bookended because I believe on the way in our
Speaker 2: main character is sort of pining for a visit to
Speaker 2: the Great Red Spot, and then later when he leaves, he's,
Speaker 2: you know, he feels kind of bittersweet about it and thinks, well,
Speaker 2: maybe I'll see it next time.
Speaker 3: Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism
Speaker 3: of the story, but this did cause me to think,
Speaker 3: with the Great Red sp feel like the Great Red
Speaker 3: Spot if you were in it instead of looking at
Speaker 3: it from above. You know. Yeah, it's like imagining wanting
Speaker 3: to go to an island, because the island is shaped
Speaker 3: like something when seen from orbit, but like when you're
Speaker 3: on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd
Speaker 3: just be on land.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I love the shape of Australia. I really
Speaker 2: want to visit it somedays so I can appreciate its shape.
Speaker 3: But then again, I'm sure the Great Red Spot, like
Speaker 3: you know, like many things on Jupiter, would be, would
Speaker 3: have fascinating local characteristics as well. It just wouldn't be
Speaker 3: a Great Red Spot anymore. It would be whatever, I
Speaker 3: don't know, winds whipping around you.
Speaker 2: So this, this story can be obtained, I've believe in
Speaker 2: at least in one major Arthur C. Clark collection, And certainly
Speaker 2: go out and read it and fall right into us
Speaker 2: if you have read in full, if you have thoughts
Speaker 2: on it. But I want to read one quick passage
Speaker 2: from it that references the Great Red Spot. Quote. The
Speaker 2: Great Red Spot itself, the most spectacular of all the
Speaker 2: planet's features, lay thousands of miles to the south. It
Speaker 2: had been a tempte to descend there, but the South
Speaker 2: Tropical Disturbance was unusually active, with currents reaching over nine
Speaker 2: hundred miles an hour. It would have been asking for
Speaker 2: trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The
Speaker 2: Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait
Speaker 2: for future expeditions.
Speaker 3: Wow, what a coincidence. I'm actually going to end up
Speaker 3: in this episode talking about the South Tropical disturbance. That's
Speaker 3: not a thing made up for the Arthur C. Clark story.
Speaker 3: That's a real thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's also I mean like how he's acknowledging
Speaker 2: the mysteries of the Great Red Spot, because as we've
Speaker 2: been discussing, there are plenty of mysteries that still remain about.
Speaker 3: It, absolutely aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays
Speaker 3: dwelling there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So we're back to continue our discussion of the
Speaker 2: Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a massive storm visible from
Speaker 2: Earth by telescope. In the last episode, we discussed the
Speaker 2: history of the spots observation in the telescopic age, beginning
Speaker 2: in the seventeenth century and then with greatly improved imaging
Speaker 2: capabilities in the twentieth century and beyond. We discussed how
Speaker 2: the Great Red Storm we know today might not be
Speaker 2: the storm that Giovanni Cassini noted in sixteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: and how the storm is long lasting compared to terrestrial storms,
Speaker 2: but still a temporary atmospheric feature in the life cycle
Speaker 2: of a planet, so it won't be there forever but
Speaker 2: we don't know when it will go away.
Speaker 3: So regarding the observations in the eighteen hundreds, I don't
Speaker 3: recall if this came up in the last episode. You
Speaker 3: can remind me if I've forgotten this, Rob, but I
Speaker 3: actually found out that there was a photo, a telescopic
Speaker 3: photo of the Great Red Spot taken of Jupiter in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century. It was taken by Irish astronomer Agnes
Speaker 3: Mary Clerk in eighteen seventy nine, and Rob I attached
Speaker 3: a copy of this black and white photo for you
Speaker 3: to look at in the outline.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 3: You don't get a lot of definition on the various
Speaker 3: bands going back and forth like you see in the
Speaker 3: good color photos of Jupiter today. Mainly it looks like
Speaker 3: one sort of light gray ball with a big dark
Speaker 3: stripe in the middle and then just a huge, gigantic
Speaker 3: elongated oval on one side of the equatorial stripe. And
Speaker 3: apparently at the time this photo was taken, it was
Speaker 3: estimated that the Great Red Spot was about forty thousand
Speaker 3: kilometers in length, so much bigger and much more elongated
Speaker 3: than it is today. That goes with what we were
Speaker 3: saying last time about the Great Red Spot. Shrinking and
Speaker 3: becoming rounder over time, and these observations more than one
Speaker 3: hundred years ago, it was gigantic and it was way
Speaker 3: more flattened out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely look up this eighteen seventy nine photograph if
Speaker 2: you have the ability to do so. Let's see. We
Speaker 2: also discussed the nature of the storm itself, somewhat an
Speaker 2: enormous anticyclone that dwarfs not only any storm we've ever
Speaker 2: known on Earth, but the Earth itself. And in this
Speaker 2: episode we're back to discuss more facts, observations, and hypotheses
Speaker 2: concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet calls Home.
Speaker 3: So Rob, one of the questions we raised last time
Speaker 3: that we didn't really get into was the question of
Speaker 3: why the Great Red Spot is red and not some
Speaker 3: other color. Of course, though we did briefly allude to
Speaker 3: the fact that it's sort of a mix of different areas. Right,
Speaker 3: There's an outer ring that's sort of like clear or
Speaker 3: white that is sometimes known as the hollow, and then
Speaker 3: inside that you've got the redder or more orange oval.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. We talked about its greatness, but not
Speaker 2: its redness so much. I want to discredit a couple
Speaker 2: of hypotheses real quick. First of all, the Great Red
Speaker 2: Spot is not the jelly insertion point on a planet
Speaker 2: that is, in essence, one gigantic jelly filled donut. I
Speaker 2: think this would be a reasonable guess to make, but
Speaker 2: it's not true.
Speaker 3: Even when you're talking about a real life donut. You
Speaker 3: just don't like thinking about the jelly insertion point, don't
Speaker 3: You just want to imagine it somehow in there without
Speaker 3: a needle.
Speaker 2: You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try
Speaker 2: and hide it. That's how you know what's inside, and
Speaker 2: maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3: You get a little peak with the durbble.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also not, as my child suggested this morning,
Speaker 2: the vast swirlings of trillions upon trillions of tabby cats.
Speaker 2: This was their Joe guests. Their serious guests, by the way,
Speaker 2: was that it was red tinted chemicals in the Jovian atmosphere,
Speaker 2: which we'll get back to it. That's a pretty good guess.
Speaker 2: But as we did talk about in the last episode, yeah,
Speaker 2: the Great Red Spot is not entirely one color, and
Speaker 2: its overall colorization and contrast has shifted quite a bit.
Speaker 2: As we mentioned seventeenth century observations of this or more
Speaker 2: likely a previous storm did not know the spot's color,
Speaker 2: as it was not detectable if that color was present.
Speaker 2: But by and large, we've seen the following trends in
Speaker 2: its overall color, and I got these from a couple
Speaker 2: of different sources that we also cited last time. Historical
Speaker 2: and contemporary trends in the size drift in color of
Speaker 2: Jupiter's Great Red Spot by Simon Etol from twenty eighteen
Speaker 2: and colors of Jupiter's large anticyclones and the interaction of
Speaker 2: a tropical red oval with the Great Red Spot in
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight by Sanchez Lavega at all, and
Speaker 2: I'll look at some more recent observations as well, and
Speaker 2: a couple of other sources. But in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 2: this is when Pioneer one and two went by striking
Speaker 2: red colorization twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, there was an intensification,
Speaker 2: a deeper orange color twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, further darkening.
Speaker 2: And we have to stress that in none of these
Speaker 2: cases are we talking about only changes in color, but
Speaker 2: also various changes in dimension, intensity, morphology, and brightness. So
Speaker 2: a lot of the analysis ends up getting into like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we can look at the color and the color intensity,
Speaker 2: but then we can attempt to chart out where that
Speaker 2: those changes match up with other changes and looking to
Speaker 2: why those changes would in fact impact the colorization. The
Speaker 2: paper by Simon at All points out some of these
Speaker 2: following facts I want to run through. They write that
Speaker 2: the grs's color changes from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: may be explained by changes and stretching of vorticity or
Speaker 2: divergence acting to balance the decrease in relative vorticity. Historically,
Speaker 2: they point out, intensity of the Great Red Spot's color
Speaker 2: appeared to be somewhat correlated with motion. The color was
Speaker 2: more intense or it was darkest when it accelerated. Color
Speaker 2: and drift rate also historically seemed to correlate.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting. So it seems to be shifting to
Speaker 3: the red when the winds are moving faster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my understanding of it here. But one of
Speaker 2: the big things that they drive home is that correlating
Speaker 2: the Great Red Spot's color changes with an actual physical
Speaker 2: mechanism is really challenging, and so a lot of the
Speaker 2: work in these papers seems to really get into that
Speaker 2: and come up with various hypotheses as to how this
Speaker 2: could be occurring. They point out that drift rate slash
Speaker 2: motion doesn't present an obvious physical mechanism other than possibly
Speaker 2: via cloud ingestion rate. They say that vortex stretching, this
Speaker 2: is the lengthening of vortices in three dimensional fluid flow,
Speaker 2: is a possible physical mechanism. And they also point out
Speaker 2: that the most recent at the time twenty fourteen through
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen changes in internal cloud morphology and color might
Speaker 2: have been due to changes in divergence, internal vorticity, and
Speaker 2: vortex stretching, rather than being correlated to its drift rate. Now,
Speaker 2: some of that may just wash past you, and I
Speaker 2: do want to acknowledge well, first of all, that this
Speaker 2: is a very complex topic and I'm just going to
Speaker 2: attempting to do my best to relate the basics of
Speaker 2: it here. But also I have to acknowledge that everything
Speaker 2: I just said didn't really answer the question of why
Speaker 2: is it red or why is it orange or rust colored? Like?
Speaker 2: What is the redness? Like? What are we looking at?
Speaker 2: And discussion of this topic is complex, it seems far
Speaker 2: from settled, but it all a lot of it anyway,
Speaker 2: as far as I can understand, revolves around candidates for
Speaker 2: the underlying chromophores, so the underlying particles that produce a
Speaker 2: given color, sometimes collectively with other chromophors in general, talking
Speaker 2: about in general about chromophors function and create colors that
Speaker 2: we sense. But in the case of the Great Red Spot,
Speaker 2: we're also considering all of this in light of the
Speaker 2: aforementioned interactions going on in the storm, including especially how
Speaker 2: high up into the atmosphere these particles are pushed. Now,
Speaker 2: one there's a particular NASA JPL scientist who is the
Speaker 2: lead author and sometimes I think maybe the supporting author
Speaker 2: on a lot of papers about this, and it's a
Speaker 2: man by the name of Robert A. West. The particular
Speaker 2: one I was looking at here is Jovian Clouds and
Speaker 2: Haze by West, Bains, and Friedson. And in this paper
Speaker 2: they present a whole list of both organic and inorganic
Speaker 2: chromophore candidates for the Great Red Spot that had been
Speaker 2: proposed over the years by that point. So they're compiling
Speaker 2: them from different different papers, different scientists and so forth.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to include them all, but they include
Speaker 2: the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on the inorganic side,
Speaker 2: and on the organic side, the list includes the likes
Speaker 2: of acetylene, photopolymers, proton irradiated H four plus NH three
Speaker 2: that's methane plus ammonia, and even biota living organisms. And
Speaker 2: the paper that they're citing for this idea was a
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six paper by Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter
Speaker 2: who speculated on the possibility of not only life on Jupiter,
Speaker 2: but a Jovian ecology.
Speaker 3: Okay, so this is in speculation mode, not to say
Speaker 3: that we have good reason to think that the red
Speaker 3: colors would be caused by living organisms, but like, what
Speaker 3: if they were caused that way. We know that say,
Speaker 3: blooms of algae in the Earth, in the Earth's oceans
Speaker 3: can change the color of the oceans. You can have
Speaker 3: various reasons that micro organisms change the color of a
Speaker 3: landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the
Speaker 3: atmosphere of Jupiter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the oceans, because that's
Speaker 2: one of the main things that Sagan and Saltpeter are
Speaker 2: referencing and sort of using as a model. And it's
Speaker 2: a very in depth paper. It's not a general audience
Speaker 2: specific paper, but I want to read a quick quote
Speaker 2: from it here. Quote we have in this discussion made
Speaker 2: no distinction among various locales on Jupiter. But it is
Speaker 2: clear that some locals, the Great Red Spot, for example,
Speaker 2: may be more favored than others because of higher abundances
Speaker 2: of organic molecules prevailing up drafts for other reasons. So yeah,
Speaker 2: to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely
Speaker 2: held candidate for a play in our solar system where
Speaker 2: you could find extraterrestrial life. Like It's not like a
Speaker 2: best case scenario, but in the paper is quite interesting
Speaker 2: and in it they outline how they believe Jupiter's atmosphere
Speaker 2: could feature quote ecological niches for sinkers, floaters, and hunters,
Speaker 2: and they explore the possibility that such life forms could
Speaker 2: exist at different stages of development in all three niches.
Speaker 2: So a sinker in this scenario would be a primary
Speaker 2: photosynthetic autotroph that reproduces as it passively sinks down through
Speaker 2: the atmosphere among its kinds. So comparable to like plankton
Speaker 2: in Earth's oceans.
Speaker 3: Okay, so getting getting energy from the sun, making its
Speaker 3: food that way and then sinking down passively through the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Right, and then the floaters would be autotrophic or heterotrophic
Speaker 2: organisms that float via some manner of inflated bladder. So
Speaker 2: these would be your space jellies, and they would eat
Speaker 2: the sinkers or and or they would depend on on
Speaker 2: solar energy as well. Okay, and then the hunter would
Speaker 2: be the next step, a predator jellyfish type creature that
Speaker 2: hunts on the floaters, or maybe it's a Manda ray.
Speaker 2: You know, you can sort of go wild with the
Speaker 2: imagination here.
Speaker 3: Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's the kind of thing you see depicted.
Speaker 2: And they point out that if this were the case,
Speaker 2: and again this is all speculation, they were just you know,
Speaker 2: it's like, what if, and how would it work? If
Speaker 2: they say that, there would be clear there would be
Speaker 2: clear evolutionary lines to connect between these different forms. And
Speaker 2: another thing that's interesting is, you know, this is exactly
Speaker 2: the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clark employed in his
Speaker 2: in that earlier novella that we cited, though of course,
Speaker 2: his vision, being a sci fi tale published in Playboy,
Speaker 2: obviously lacked the scientific rigor presented in the Sag and
Speaker 2: Saltpeter paper here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, though, of course Clark was quite concerned in anyways
Speaker 3: with plausibility. But he's also just trying to tell a
Speaker 3: good story.
Speaker 2: Right, and not really featuring a lot of equations. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah, no shade at Arthur C. Clark at all here.
Speaker 2: So as interesting as all this is the more accepted
Speaker 2: theories for red chromophores in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter,
Speaker 2: they're not based on the idea that there's life in there.
Speaker 2: We still don't have a firm answer. But I wanted
Speaker 2: to discuss at least one of the more recent ideas
Speaker 2: that seems to have gotten a lot of attention. So
Speaker 2: there was one from twenty fourteen. This was an idea
Speaker 2: presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, and
Speaker 2: he proposed that what we're broadly seeing is perhaps a
Speaker 2: mixture of ammonia and acetylene gases blasted by solar energy
Speaker 2: in the high upper reaches of the Great Red Spot.
Speaker 2: So we mentioned in the last episode that the Great
Speaker 2: Red Spot is pretty deep, it goes pretty deep down,
Speaker 2: But I don't know if we really talked about how
Speaker 2: high up it goes. I've read that the Great Red
Speaker 2: Spot may extend something like eight kilometers or five miles
Speaker 2: above the surrounding cloud tops in Jupiter's atmosphere. So the
Speaker 2: idea here is that it's pushing its contents up higher
Speaker 2: in the atmosphere than the surrounding areas and in doing
Speaker 2: so subjecting them to greater solar interference, greater solar UV light,
Speaker 2: and laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible.
Speaker 2: So the idea here is that we have these chromophores,
Speaker 2: these ammonium and settling gases that are not already red
Speaker 2: in color, but they are shot up high enough that
Speaker 2: they are exposed to more UV light, more solar radiation,
Speaker 2: and that is what generates the color that we see
Speaker 2: as the Great Red Spot. Okay, if this hypothesis is correct,
Speaker 2: it would mean that the Great Red Spot is not
Speaker 2: like red all the way down. It would just be
Speaker 2: red more or less at the surface, something that you
Speaker 2: see compared in some of the science journalism, especially to
Speaker 2: a sunburn.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so I saw this. I saw articles describing
Speaker 3: the sunburn hypothesis of the redness, though a different mechanism
Speaker 3: obviously than like inflamed skin.
Speaker 2: But yeah, but skin deep, I guess is the metaphor
Speaker 2: you could use here. Now. To be clear, there are
Speaker 2: other competing hypotheses in which in which it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: just gray or white underneath, it would be like red
Speaker 2: all the way down. These competing hypotheses still envision some
Speaker 2: model in which there are red chromophores that are pushed
Speaker 2: up through the storm from greater depths, but they're red
Speaker 2: in color within the storm as well as at the
Speaker 2: upper surface. So again, yeah, it's a complex topic, getting
Speaker 2: like it's so red eyes, it's so red. Well, we
Speaker 2: don't know for sure, but we have some very interesting
Speaker 2: hypotheses as to why, some definitely more believable and likely
Speaker 2: than others. But that makes that I do love the
Speaker 2: idea that, hey, what if it's read because it's just
Speaker 2: full of life? That would be crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what if we're looking at algol blooms and certain
Speaker 3: bands all on the surface.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, it's really it's the more exciting. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean, I think all these ideas are exciting, but
Speaker 2: you can you can imagine where that idea would maybe
Speaker 2: be that nice mix of exciting and accessible to the
Speaker 2: average person. But yeah, I don't think that's what's going
Speaker 2: on there.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to come back to a question we
Speaker 3: raised in the last episode. We established last time that
Speaker 3: the great red Spot of today, at least according to
Speaker 3: most informed observers, is probably not the same red spot
Speaker 3: seen by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini in the seventeenth century.
Speaker 3: You know, we talked about him. He saw a spot
Speaker 3: in the sixteen sixties. But it's probably not the same
Speaker 3: one for a number of reasons, one of which is
Speaker 3: that astronomers stopped seeing the spot for like many decades.
Speaker 3: It seems like suddenly, like in the seventeen hundreds, people
Speaker 3: are not seeing this thing anymore. And it seems like
Speaker 3: astronomers don't know a giant red spot again until about
Speaker 3: eighteen thirty one. So that seems quite implausible if it
Speaker 3: was the same spot and it was there the whole time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, otherwise people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: So it's very unlikely that it's the same spot astronomers
Speaker 3: saw in the seventeenth century. But that suggests that storms
Speaker 3: like this come and go. And if they come and go,
Speaker 3: where do they come from how did the current spot
Speaker 3: arise in the first place. Now, in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: there was a bunch of reporting about the origin of
Speaker 3: the Great Red Spot based on the publication of a
Speaker 3: scientific paper that we did mention in part one of
Speaker 3: this series, but I'm going to give the full citation here.
Speaker 3: The paper is called the Origin of Jupiter's Great Red Spot,
Speaker 3: and it was by a group of authors, the first
Speaker 3: author of which we actually just mentioned another paper by
Speaker 3: them a moment ago, but anyway, it's by Augustine Sanchez
Speaker 3: la Vega, Enrique Garcia Melando, John Legereta, Arnew, Miro Menel
Speaker 3: Soria and Kevin Arenz Velasquez. This was published in Geophysical
Speaker 3: Research Letters in twenty twenty four, and the authors of
Speaker 3: this paper were based, I believe, all in Spain at
Speaker 3: several different institutions like the University of the Basque Country
Speaker 3: and Polytechnic University of Catalonia. And in addition to this paper,
Speaker 3: I relied on some explanation and analysis from several articles,
Speaker 3: especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and science
Speaker 3: communicator Phil Plait that was from July twenty twenty four. Now,
Speaker 3: before I get into the details about this discovery. I
Speaker 3: did want to mention a bit of background about the
Speaker 3: structure of Jupiter in its atmosphere because that kind of
Speaker 3: informs this research. So a few things about the structure
Speaker 3: of Jupiter we didn't quite get into yet. Jupiter is
Speaker 3: made mostly of the same thing the Sun is made of,
Speaker 3: actually of hydrogen and helium, and so if you're going
Speaker 3: from the outside in, Jupiter has a vast layer of
Speaker 3: atmospheric gas, again dominated by hydrogen and helium, along with
Speaker 3: small amounts of other stuff like water, methane and ammonia,
Speaker 3: and some hydrocarbons like benzene, and then beneath that you
Speaker 3: keep going down and the pressure eventually becomes so great
Speaker 3: that the hydrogen takes a liquid form, and you will
Speaker 3: have a planet wide ocean of liquid hydrogen. So that
Speaker 3: makes it the runaway winner for the largest ocean in
Speaker 3: the Solar System. Though one thing that's worth noting is
Speaker 3: that the boundaries between these layers are not sharp. Instead,
Speaker 3: they gradually bleed into one another. So falling through the
Speaker 3: atmosphere of Jupiter into its global ocean would not be
Speaker 3: like falling through the atmosphere of Earth and then suddenly
Speaker 3: hitting the surface of the water where the smack. Instead,
Speaker 3: you would be continually sinking through a thick hot hydrogen
Speaker 3: helium stew of increasing density and heat as you go down,
Speaker 3: which eventually becomes fully liquid. And then, of course, if
Speaker 3: you keep going down from their conditions change further further
Speaker 3: into the liquid hydrogen ocean, you reach a layer of
Speaker 3: what scientists call liquid metallic hydrogen. At this point, the
Speaker 3: pressure is so extreme that electrons pop off of the
Speaker 3: hydrogen atoms. So normally a hydrogen atom is one proton
Speaker 3: and one electron. Here the electrons get squeezed off of
Speaker 3: these atomic nuclei and they can flow unrestrained through the fluid,
Speaker 3: making it extremely electrically conductive like a metal, which actually
Speaker 3: creates the dynamo effect that scientists think is responsible for
Speaker 3: generating Jupiter's magnetic field. So this metallic hydrogen layer is
Speaker 3: also known as the inner mantle, and it takes up
Speaker 3: most of the planet's radius. If you measure the diameter
Speaker 3: of Jupiter, most of it is this metallic hydrogen layer,
Speaker 3: and then even deeper than that, the mantle is thought
Speaker 3: to graduate into a loose core made of denser materials,
Speaker 3: maybe some rocky icy solids leftover from the planet's early formation.
Speaker 3: But there's still a bunch of unanswered questions about exactly
Speaker 3: what the core is made of and how it is structured.
Speaker 3: This was one of the issues that NASA's Junomission was investigating.
Speaker 3: But anyway, when you look at the composition of the
Speaker 3: planet like this, it makes me think about how in
Speaker 3: the previous episode, probably a bunch of times I was
Speaker 3: saying stuff about the surface features of Jupiter. I was
Speaker 3: talking about the red spot and other things you can
Speaker 3: see this way, But of course Jupiter does not actually
Speaker 3: have a surface. What we're describing when we talk about
Speaker 3: its surface are, in reality, patterns of clouds at the
Speaker 3: top of Jupiter's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: I mean, it even gets complicated when we start talking
Speaker 2: about the surface of Earth because this we've talked about
Speaker 2: in our discussions of the deep ocean. You know, it's like,
Speaker 2: I mean, technically the deep ocean, if if you're at
Speaker 2: the bottom of the sea, you're standing on the rocky
Speaker 2: surface of the planet. So you know, it's like our
Speaker 2: world's kind of weird. And then we we equate everything
Speaker 2: to the slim layer of the atmosphere in which we
Speaker 2: can live, so Yeah, what do we mean by surface
Speaker 2: with a planet anyway?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I mean often it gets into a question
Speaker 3: of definition. It's not as clear as you thought, what
Speaker 3: do you mean by surface? And a lot of times
Speaker 3: what we mean when we're just talking casually is what's
Speaker 3: the part of the planet I can see from space?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, how would like balloon based floating organisms judge
Speaker 2: life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like
Speaker 2: bottom dwellers or something. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So anyway, another thing that's important to understand about
Speaker 3: the structure of Jupiter, if you're going to get into
Speaker 3: the origins of the Great Red Spot, is the planet's
Speaker 3: zonal striping pattern. Jupiter has these lateral bands going parallel
Speaker 3: to its equator. You've got dark stripes mostly red and
Speaker 3: orange in color from our perspective at least, and white
Speaker 3: or light colored stripes. These are known as belts and zones, respectively.
Speaker 3: The dark stripes are the belts and the light stripes
Speaker 3: are the zones. Jupiter generates a lot of internal heat.
Speaker 3: The majority of the heat in Earth's atmosphere comes from
Speaker 3: the Sun comes down from above, but the majority of
Speaker 3: heat in Jupiter's atmosphere actually comes from deep within Jupiter itself,
Speaker 3: it's getting more heat from inside than from outside, So
Speaker 3: the superheated lower strata of Jupiter's atmosphere and the liquid
Speaker 3: hydrogen level these fluids create convection currents as the heat
Speaker 3: wants to rise, so hotid rises up through low pressure
Speaker 3: areas of the atmosphere all the way up to the top,
Speaker 3: and then it cools, circulates, and sinks back down again
Speaker 3: in higher pressure areas. Actually similar to what happens with
Speaker 3: air circulation patterns on Earth, but the gas giants are
Speaker 3: larger than the inner planets and they rotate faster. A
Speaker 3: day on Jupiter is only nine point nine hours, so
Speaker 3: this extremely fast rotation causes a pronounced Coriolis effect, which
Speaker 3: we talked about last time in the context of Earth.
Speaker 3: Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more extreme than Earth's because Jupiter
Speaker 3: is larger and spinning faster, and this pronounced Coriolis effect
Speaker 3: creates powerful jet streams running parallel to Jupiter's equator. These
Speaker 3: jet streams form the boundaries of Jupiter's belts and zones.
Speaker 3: So each zone, remember the light colored areas, Each zone
Speaker 3: tends to be a basically low pressured area. There's some
Speaker 3: variation in pressure at different altitudes. But basically, a zone
Speaker 3: is a low pressure area where warm fluid rises up
Speaker 3: through the atmosphere and it is bounded on each side
Speaker 3: by jet streams, with an east running jet on the
Speaker 3: side facing the pole and a west running jet on
Speaker 3: the side facing the equator. Belts are the inverse. You've
Speaker 3: got high pressure areas again, generally where cool material sinks
Speaker 3: back down into the atmosphere, where the side facing the
Speaker 3: pole is bounded by a west flowing jet and the
Speaker 3: side facing the equator has an eastward jet. Now what
Speaker 3: determines the color differences in these different bands, again, we
Speaker 3: don't know for sure. One big idea is that the
Speaker 3: zones are bright because the clouds up high in altitude,
Speaker 3: the first thing we see from the outside contain crystals
Speaker 3: of ammonia ice, which look white, and the belts have
Speaker 3: thinner ice clouds with less ammonia ice, so instead we
Speaker 3: see other things. We see a brown, red, or orange color,
Speaker 3: which could be caused by different chemicals the chromophores you
Speaker 3: were talking about. It's maybe it's caused by sunburn like
Speaker 3: you mentioned, or maybe by the presence of hydrocarbons. We
Speaker 3: don't really know for sure, but it does seem like
Speaker 3: the white color of the zones is probably due to
Speaker 3: the ammonia ice clouds.
Speaker 2: Little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular alcoholic
Speaker 2: beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today.
Speaker 3: The jellyfish frat boys, they like the ami ice, the
Speaker 3: ami ice and the amy light. Oh but if you're
Speaker 3: a jellyfish, you can't open it with your teeth or
Speaker 3: your belt buckle, no hard parts anywhere, or how do
Speaker 3: you get it open.
Speaker 2: There's going to have to be a whole nother paper
Speaker 2: just on this topic.
Speaker 3: But anyway, coming back to the Great Red Spot itself, now,
Speaker 3: we've already talked again about the idea that the current
Speaker 3: great red spot that we see today has definitely existed
Speaker 3: for more than one hundred and ninety years. It was
Speaker 3: seen and described in eighteen thirty one. We have strong
Speaker 3: reason for believing it was not the same spot Cassini
Speaker 3: saw in the sixteen sixties. So how did it form?
Speaker 3: The study I mentioned by Sanchez la Vega at all
Speaker 3: used a combination of historical observations beginning in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: So like drawings made by astronomers throughout the years and
Speaker 3: descriptions that they left, as well as modern numerical modeling
Speaker 3: of the storm to answer the question of how it
Speaker 3: formed and to answer the question of whether it was
Speaker 3: the same spot. But we've already answered that one. No,
Speaker 3: it's almost certainly not the same spot. But coming to
Speaker 3: the question of how it formed, they tested three potential
Speaker 3: explanations to see which one would lead to the formation
Speaker 3: of a giant anti cyclone storm like the Great Red
Speaker 3: Spot in their simulation. So we'll look at these three
Speaker 3: different hypotheses they explored one at a time. One of
Speaker 3: them is that it was created by the merging of
Speaker 3: two or more smaller storms or smaller vortices. This can
Speaker 3: and does happen frequently on Jupiter, at least they can
Speaker 3: merge together. But when the authors ran the simulation here,
Speaker 3: they found that merging these smaller vortices did not produce
Speaker 3: a storm matching the Great Red Spot. Essentially, even if
Speaker 3: you kept adding more and more smaller input storms, I
Speaker 3: think they said, like four or five of them, you
Speaker 3: still did not get a system as big as the
Speaker 3: early observations of the GRS. Also, this doesn't match because
Speaker 3: the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by
Speaker 3: astronomers before eight thirty one, and the authors think they
Speaker 3: would have been easy enough to see that somebody probably
Speaker 3: would have noted them, so the merging of smaller vortices
Speaker 3: that probably did not create it. Another idea is what
Speaker 3: about a superstorm or megastorm. This would be caused by
Speaker 3: an eruption of warmer material, warmer matter from lower down
Speaker 3: in in Jupiter, in Jupiter's atmosphere and that welling up
Speaker 3: into the upper atmosphere and causing a storm. We do
Speaker 3: see things happen like this on other gas giants, like
Speaker 3: on Saturn. Saturn apparently has recurring megastorms that appear roughly
Speaker 3: once between every twenty and thirty years, typically when it
Speaker 3: is summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The cause of these
Speaker 3: storms is not fully understood, but if you want to
Speaker 3: see examples of this, you can look up images that
Speaker 3: the Cassini probe took in December twenty ten, or actually
Speaker 3: the images might have been from later, maybe from two
Speaker 3: thousand and eleven, but it was of a storm that
Speaker 3: emerged in the northern hemisphere of Saturn in December twenty ten.
Speaker 3: You might have seen this before. It almost looks kind
Speaker 3: of like a big, I don't know, milky white cloud
Speaker 3: sort of billowing through like a long a latitudinal line
Speaker 3: along the northern half of Saturn. I don't know how
Speaker 3: else to describe it, as like, you know, somebody took
Speaker 3: a kind of milk straw and moved it through the
Speaker 3: through the yellow.
Speaker 2: I have to say that the images of the superstorm
Speaker 2: on Saturn, it looks very chill. It's very on brand
Speaker 2: for Saturn, I guess. But everything with Saturn always feels
Speaker 2: kind of serene, and everything with Jupiter feels like intimidating
Speaker 2: and a bit chaotic.
Speaker 3: Somehow, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, Saturn almost Saturn nine
Speaker 3: in character. There you go, so the author is considered
Speaker 3: it plausible. This could be an explanation of what's happening
Speaker 3: on Jupiter as well. Yeah, like maybe some kind of
Speaker 3: warmer material is there's a convective current that's bringing up
Speaker 3: this warmer material from below and it's creating a storm.
Speaker 3: They did find that an upwelling like this could create
Speaker 3: a large anti cyclonic storm, but again it was not
Speaker 3: big enough to explain the early observations of the Great
Speaker 3: Red Spot. It didn't create a system the size and
Speaker 3: shape of those early sightings. Also, Jupiter has not been
Speaker 3: observed to form superstorms of this kind at the near
Speaker 3: equatorial latitude of the Great Red Spot. But then you
Speaker 3: get to the final idea they tested for where this
Speaker 3: could have come from, and this is what is known
Speaker 3: as the South tropical disturbance. Bringing us back to Arthur C. Clark,
Speaker 3: this would be a kind of unstable wind situation. So
Speaker 3: this happens when the boundary between two of Jupiter's adjacent
Speaker 3: bands becomes unstable, and essentially a jet of wind from
Speaker 3: one band pushes up into the normal lattitud tudes of
Speaker 3: another band. This of course disrupts the flow of the
Speaker 3: target band and it creates a vortex, a swirling wind
Speaker 3: pattern instead of the straight flowing wind pattern, and in
Speaker 3: this case the resulting vortex can become huge. And the
Speaker 3: simulation of this hypothesis found that yes, indeed, it could
Speaker 3: produce a vortex matching the size and the original shape
Speaker 3: of the Great Red Spot as seen in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: They also found that this wind mechanism could explain the
Speaker 3: changes in size and shape of the GRS over time,
Speaker 3: and so the authors conclude this is most likely how
Speaker 3: the Great Red Spot formed. It was from this unstable
Speaker 3: wind wind condition, the south tropical disturbance, the wind flowing
Speaker 3: from one band into the other and then creating this
Speaker 3: giant vortex that was self sustaining and has been self
Speaker 3: sustaining now for more than one hundred ninety years I
Speaker 3: think one hundred and ninety four years today, is that right?
Speaker 3: Something like that anyway, But this brings us back to
Speaker 3: the question that we've already addressed before. Can we use
Speaker 3: this information to judge how long it will last? Probably
Speaker 3: not really. It has been shrinking for years, especially in
Speaker 3: the last decade and a half it seems to have
Speaker 3: been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear in the near future,
Speaker 3: but as we've said several times now, we just don't
Speaker 3: have enough information or understanding to make a firm prediction.
Speaker 3: Maybe it will last a long time, yet we don't
Speaker 3: really know.
Speaker 2: The big question, Joe is will it still be there
Speaker 2: in the year twenty four to one, Because in the
Speaker 2: series finale of Star Trek Picard, that is when we
Speaker 2: see a massive borg cube ship hide in and then
Speaker 2: emerge from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
Speaker 3: I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a
Speaker 3: good place to hide.
Speaker 2: Well, it's the last place you'd think, right.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, do they not have cloaking?
Speaker 2: Do I do?
Speaker 3: I forget how cloaking works.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know there is cloaking, but I don't remember
Speaker 2: if the boards have cloaking or maybe you know, you
Speaker 2: could see through the cloaking. You know, maybe they're just
Speaker 2: being dramatic. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Maybe they got to power up, they got to get
Speaker 3: some of that red red stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, this is there. This is still part of
Speaker 2: that era where they're ruled by a queen as opposed
Speaker 2: to just being a complete like cyborg communist collective. So yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, it's possible that they could make choices purely
Speaker 2: for dramatic purposes.
Speaker 3: Okay, so red, the red spot, it's it's part of
Speaker 3: the queen's pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3: Well, actually I do have a good answer to that question,
Speaker 3: believe it or not. So we don't know if the
Speaker 3: red spot will still be there. It seems to be shrinking.
Speaker 3: Maybe it'd be gone by then, but since previous giant
Speaker 3: spots have disappeared and new ones have appeared, if we
Speaker 3: lose the current great Red Spot, it may well be
Speaker 3: replaced by another spot, maybe much like the original, or
Speaker 3: like the one we have.
Speaker 2: Now, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: Great red spots come, great Red spots go, But I
Speaker 3: don't know if they're ever a good place to park
Speaker 3: a space ship.
Speaker 2: Well, this is a fun couple of episodes put together here,
Speaker 2: and I'd love to hear from everyone out there in
Speaker 2: general about the science we've been discussing here, but also
Speaker 2: about this the sci fi flavor. Places where Jupiter's Great
Speaker 2: Red Spot has popped up certainly as a backdrop, but
Speaker 2: I'm also interested in times where it may be a
Speaker 2: setting or a location. In addition to the two examples
Speaker 2: we've brought up here, just a reminder for everyone that's
Speaker 2: stuff to blow your mind. Is primarily a science and
Speaker 2: culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
Speaker 2: form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
Speaker 2: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 2: on Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us online,
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Speaker 2: We're on a few other social media accounts as well.
Speaker 2: We are a weird house on letterboxed and oh yeah,
Speaker 2: we have a discord. If you'd like to join that
Speaker 2: discord server, well, you can just email us at the
Speaker 2: email address we're going to share in just a minute here.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
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