What is a space hurricane?

Daniel and Jorge swirl their minds together into a stormy mix of puns and physics and tackle this spacey topic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, or hey, have you ever been in a hurricane? Uh?
Technically no, really, Panama doesn't get hurricanes. I think we
felt the effects of them, but none of them have
technically touched us, except maybe like one a long time ago. Well,
then maybe you'll get your chance here in l A. Really,
Los Angeles gets hurricanes not very often, but the occasional
Mexican hurricane is strong enough to make it all the

(00:29):
way up here. I like myc a little spicy. Yeah,
there's nothing worse than like a bland hurricane. It's just
boring hundred mile and hour winds. Hi. I'm or handmade

(00:55):
cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. H I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist, and I also never been in
a hurricane. You've never lived to tell the tale, that's right.
Never been like one of those reporters standing in knee
deep water with winds blowing all around them. I would
have been out of there much sooner. You've never been
in a science hurricane, like a flurry of scientific discovery

(01:15):
and activity, like wind of knowledge blowing over everything. It's
definitely felt like a thunderstorm. How and then with some
of the conflicts and the egos. But no, never officially
a science hurricane. You've never upgraded that brainstorm to like
a brain hurricane. Maybe I'm just trapped in the eye.
But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio, in which we explore

(01:38):
the swirling mysteries of the universe. We rain knowledge down
upon you and try to blow confusion away with hundred
mile and our winds of silly jokes. In our podcast,
we tackle the biggest, deepest, most dramatic questions of the universe.
We don't shy away from any and every topic, and
we find some nugget of mystery or knowledge and we

(02:01):
break it open for you and try to explain it
with a few dad jokes. That's right. We try to
sweep you off your feet with giant winds of corny
jokes and serious knowledge about the universe and everything in it,
because it really does make us spin. I mean, this
universe we live in is fantastic. It's beautiful, it's wet,
it's wild, it's crazy. There are so many things we

(02:24):
need to understand, and not just at the most fundamental level.
As a particle physicist, my job is to break the
universe down to the very very smallest bits and understand
the deepest, most fundamental nature of the universe. But even
if we did that, it doesn't mean necessarily it would
help us understand the world around us. You can't go
from string theory to predicting weather. So sometimes there are

(02:46):
deep mysteries worth tackling that are right around us, at
the same scale as our lives. Yeah, because I guess
the universe does seem a little unpredictable sometimes. I mean,
it's pretty chaotic out there. Even though it sort of
seems nice and calm here, there are parts of the
universe that are pretty crazy and there's a lot going
on in there. Yeah. We talk a lot on the
podcast about how complex phenomena arise from really simple rules

(03:08):
and simple objects. From just a few particles, you can
make everything that anybody has ever touched, tasted, or eaten,
and that includes really weird stuff like people and hurricanes.
It's amazing what this universe has cooked up for us
out of a few basic elements, and some of it
is really quite complex and very very difficult to predict.

(03:29):
Some of it we just have to look at in wonder. Yeah,
and so here on Earth we have weather, which is
pretty chaotic. Although I feel like we have done a
pretty good job in you know, meteorology, of predicting the
weather a little bit, or at least forecasting the weather
annoying when and where hurricanes are going. Yeah, I feel
like comedy hasn't really caught up with progress in weather science.
Used to be a standing joke that nobody could predict

(03:52):
the weather, but these days they're actually pretty good at it.
I find myself relying on my little weather app to
tell me if it's going to rain today or tomorrow.
Maybe that's just easy in southern California because it says
it never rains. Yeah, you just need comedians to predict
the weather, you know, just give him a sharpie and
they'll know exactly where the hurricanes go. Maybe this wisdom
in the crowd, right, Get a hundred comedians in the
room and ask them where the hurricane is going to go,

(04:14):
and that we'll see if on average they're right. Yeah,
and if they bomb, maybe that will I don't know,
dissipate the hurricane or something, or maybe all the arguing
will create a hurricane of shouting or hurricane of egos
or all the groaning from the bad jokes. Will I
don't know, blow a lot of hot air and blow
away to story. Yeah, but meteorologists are still the butt
of jokes about how they can't predict the weather, even

(04:34):
though I think they are doing a pretty good job
these days. Yeah. So the weather here on Earth, which
is kind of a little bit crazy, sometimes chaotic, a
little bit unpredictable still sometimes So the question is does
that happen in other parts of the universe? Is there
an equivalent of weather out there in space, maybe other planets,
or in between planets, or out there in the galaxies

(04:56):
or between galaxies. And as usual, we're wondering if the
ti arunti we see here on Earth are particular to
Earth or if they are universal. This little parochial tribe
of humans trying to crack big questions about the universe,
having only looked at the way things work on Earth,
we're always faced with this question of whether we can
take the things we've learned here and generalized to the

(05:18):
rest of the universe, or if we live in a
really weird, unusual corner and the things that happened here
only happened here. Like the people and ice cream Sundays
and all that kind of stuff. So are hurricanes at
universal phenomena experienced on every planet around the universe, or
are they something that space tourists will come to Earth
just to experience. So to be on the podcast, we'll

(05:39):
be asking the question what is a space hurricane? So
I feel like we're asking like, are there hurricanes in space?
Or can you make a hurricane in space? Or what's
the equivalent of a hurricane in space? For all of
the above, it sounds like a pitch for a movie

(06:00):
on the Discovery Channel, you know. It sounds like in
the category of shark tornado. You know, take two cool
words and put them together, right. Yeah, It's like if
the Weather Channel and the Discovery Channel teamed up and
made a special movie space hurricane with sharks, Space Sharknado,
Hurricane with dinosaurs in it. I'm sure somebody in the
writer's room has already thought that idea up and discarded it,

(06:23):
thank God. And then you throw like a bachelor in
there and also a home remodeling project, and you've got
Emmy Award winning television right there. Flip your house and
get married using a space hurricane filled with sharks that
sounds like a great show and dinosaurs also, everything can
happen here on this show. But yeah, that's an interesting question,

(06:46):
what is a space hurricane? And this sort of relates
to that question. We were asking about space weather, like
is there the equivalent of weather out there in space
and with all that gas and dust maybe out there floating. Yeah,
and we're interested in whether these oterns we see in
hurricanes here on Earth are replicated maybe in other forms,
maybe not in water, maybe not in air, maybe in

(07:08):
other objects out there in space and other parts of
the universe, so that when the aliens come we will
have something to talk to them about. Well, as usually,
we were wondering how many people out there had heard
of a space hurricane or had any idea of what
it is. So Daniel went out there into the wilds
of the Internet to ask people what is a space hurricane? So,

(07:29):
if you live in the wilds of the Internet and
you would like to answer random questions I sent you
with no opportunity to prepare, please write to me two
questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. I personally live
in the planes of the Internet. It's a lot calma there.
There's no Twitter or Facebook, just a gentle wind of
Wikipedia information. Every time you say the wilds of the Internet,

(07:51):
it makes me feel like a rugged explore risking my
life to go out there and gather information in the
name of science. I mean reaching out to strangers and Internet.
It's totally safe. These are our listeners men. They are
nice people. M I see. That's all it takes to
be your friend, Daniel. Just be willing to listen to
about physics. Absolutely. Anybody willing to listen to this podcast

(08:13):
is definitely my friend. All right, Well, think about it
for a second. If someone asks you, what is a
space hurricane, what would you answer. Here's what people had
to say. I assume it has something to do with well,
space weather and possibly solar wind or stellar wind. I'm
not entirely sure. Maybe there's hurricanes. I don't think it
would count as a hurricane on the Sun or a
hurricane on say Jupiter, because they're not quiet space hurricanes. Um,

(08:39):
maybe it's some sort of hurricane to do with the
curvature of a space maybe approaching a black hole, something
along those lines. I have no idea what a space
hurricane is, but I would have to guess that it
has something to do with solo winds. But it sounds
like a swirling mass of If it's in space, it's

(09:00):
probably something like stars or something else with a lot
of mass. When you look at a hurricane and Earth,
it sure looks like a galaxy, So maybe a spiral
galaxy is a space hurricane. I can imagine the space
hurricane is created by the solar ring, so like there's
a big outburst from the Sun um that creates space weather,

(09:21):
and if it's a really extreme outburst, then it might
create a space hurricane. But I can also imagine um
movement of stuff in space itself might create vortexes or
space hurricanes. Hope you will all right. I guess it's
some pretty interesting answers here. I feel like people sort

(09:44):
of thought about a hurricane and what it looks like
in pictures that the swirling massive stuff, and then they
try to, I don't know, project it into space, like
what would that look like in space or in other planets. Yeah,
it's some great examples of generalization, like this is real
physics in action here. I love people take this idea
and wonder whether or not it could exist in other forms. Awesome,

(10:05):
especially the one about a galaxy being a space hurricane.
Very cool, right, Yeah, it is a galaxy technically a
space hurricane. Like they look kind of the same as
a big flushing toilet or swirling disc. Right, that's kind
of what a hurricane is, and that's kind of what
a galaxy is. Yeah, we'll get into it. But a
hurricane actually is a low pressure center, right where things
flow out from the center, and a galaxy, of course

(10:27):
is very high pressure center. It's really the densest spot
with if all the forces pulling towards the center of
the galaxy. So the mechanisms are something different, but you're right,
they do look kind of similar. It's an anti hurricane.
Maybe it would be awesome that have a hurricane where
it's raining stars instead of water droplets. That's pretty meta,
that would be That sounds really dangerous. You would definitely

(10:48):
not be a weatherman standing there for very long. Yeah,
what kind of hurricane proofing do you need when it's
raining stars? That sounds like another great show on the
Discovery slash Weather channel Surviving Extreme Space Weather Raining Stars.
But let's get into it then. I guess step us
through here, Daniel. First of all, let's tackle one word
at a time. So a hurricane, what is that technically

(11:10):
here on Earth? Like, how do we get hurricanes? And
what technically counts as a hurricane? And is that the
right name for the weather phenomenon that most people think
of when they think of hurricanes. I was really surprised
to learn that you give the name hurricane to a
particular type of storm that appears all around the world,
but you only call it a hurricane if it appears
in particular places in the Atlantic or in the northeastern Pacific.

(11:35):
It's the most general phrase. Is a cyclone this this
kind of storm you get over the water, but you
only call it a hurricane in various parts of the world.
It's like the naming committee couldn't agree on what I
call these things, and so they broke up without like
a global agreement for what to call them. I see now,
is this like a convenient naming you know, scheme or
is this just like out of the history of how

(11:56):
like you know, people who lived here called it a
hurricane and people who lived over there call it a typhoon.
You know. Is it like pop and soda and coke
or is it like you know, scientists were like, okay,
we'll call these the ones that we hear this and
the ones that were there, and we'll call them that.
There's really no difference between a hurricane in the Atlantic,
or a typhoon in the Northwest specific or a tropical

(12:18):
cyclone in the South Pacific. They're fundamentally the same thing.
The only thing that differentiates them is where they happen.
So the naming convention is just historic. That's what we
call those storms. And then I think later people understood
in more detail. All these are really all sort of
examples of the same thing I see. But the technical term,
the scientific term is actually cyclone, yeah exactly, which sounds

(12:41):
like a killer robot from the future or something, but
it really just describes this sort of spinning storm that
you get, which is very typical the kind of storm
I think about when I think about a hurricane. I see,
so all hurricanes are cyclones, but not all cyclones are hurricanes,
that's right, exactly. So they're called typhoons in Northwest Pacific
and tropical cyclones in the South Pacific or Indian Ocean.

(13:04):
So what are the basics of the cyclone storm? So
it's the same all around the world, and it's this
phenomenon where you have a bunch of really warm water,
and so the water heats up the air that's above
it and moistens it because the water is evaporating from
the surface, and then hot air rises, right, and so
the hot air rises over this warm spot in the ocean,

(13:26):
and because the air is rising, it causes this low
pressure center because the air is leaving, so other air
sort of have to get sucked in. So it sucks
in air from around it, which then rises up and
has to go somewhere and then spreads out. So you
get this pattern where air is getting pulled in over
the water, rising up and then spreading out. And that's

(13:49):
the basics of it. And if the Earth wasn't spinning,
the cyclones wouldn't spin either. The way these storms start
to spin is just because of the spin of the Earth, right,
It's you to the Coriolis effect, right, that's right. As
these winds blow outwards from the center of the storm,
they start to curve. And the reason is really cool
is because, as you say, it's because of the Coriolis effect.

(14:11):
If you're standing on the equator, then you are spinning
around the Earth really fast. Right, You're going a thousand
miles per hour. The surface of the Earth at the
equator is moving a thousand miles per hour. The surface
of the Earth at the North pole isn't moving at all, right,
I mean, you're spinning in place, but you're not actually moving.
So what that means is that the closer you are

(14:32):
to the equator, the faster you're moving, and the closer
you are to the north or South pole, the slower
you're moving. That's very cool a sort of to know,
but it has an actual effect because if you have
air that moves from the equator up towards the poles,
then it's moving faster than the air it's encountering, and
so it actually sort of drifts. So, for example, if

(14:52):
you're in the northern part of the Earth, in the
northern hemisphere, air that moves up from the equator towards
the north is going faster than the other air, so
it actually sort of curves to the east. So air
that flows north from the equator curves to the east,
and air that flows south from the North pole is
going too slow to catch up with the air it
is encountering, so it sort of flows a little bit

(15:14):
to the west, so you get this curving effect just
due to the spinning of the Earth. Right, So then
the idea is that the warm air heats up the
air above it, that air gets kind of sucked up
into the upper atmosphere, and that draws in cold air
which comes in with some sort of spin or some
sort of kind of skew twit, which then starts kind
of the swirl of it. Right, And so you can

(15:37):
make this mental picture in your mind of air getting
pulled towards the hurricane from the south curves to the right,
and air coming down from the north also curves to
its right. And so everywhere as the air is getting
pulled towards the center of the thing is curving towards
the right. So then it becomes self reinforcing and this
whole thing starts to spin. But to me, it's just

(15:58):
sort of awesome that you could like prove that the
Earth is spinning just by looking at hurricanes, right, Or
how toilets flashed technically right, Like you don't need to
leave your house, you can just flush the toilet. I
think that's an urban legend, man, I think toilets flushed
the same way in Australia. Well, may it depends on
how you designed the toilet. You're right. If you have
a toilet it's like a thousand miles wide, then maybe

(16:20):
you're right. Yeah, that's what I mean. Isn't your toilet
a thousand miles wide? I don't know what you had
for lunch, dude, but just my particular needs. That's a
spicy hurricane, my friend. But the amazing thing is that
in the Southern hemisphere storms really do spin the other
way because the same effect works the opposite way in
the Southern hemisphere. So if the air is flowing from

(16:41):
the equator towards the south, then it's going faster than
the air it's encountering. But now it's going to spin
the other direction. Right, it's going to spin sort of too.
It's left. The same deal. If air is coming from
the south pole up towards the equator right, then it's
going slower than the air that's spinning. It's going to
her to the left, and so you get storm spinning

(17:03):
the other way in the Southern hemisphere. I think this
is super awesome. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And so I
guess maybe a quick question is, like what happens to
all that air getting sucked up. Does it just go
up to the upper atmosphere and then dissipates or does
it recycle kind of down and then helps to feed
that hurricane. Yes, you're right. The cold air gets sucked

(17:24):
in and then it rises and then it flows out
in this sort of big shield. And that's what you
see sort of from the space if you're looking at
this hurricane, that you get this like big spinning shield
that sort of spins out away from the hurricane. And
so that's what these sort of these arms are there,
these clouds and condensation formed from the air flowing away

(17:45):
from the center of the hurricane and the upper atmosphere.
So a hurricane it's actually like a three D thing.
It's not just a swirl like the air and the
bottom is swirling inwards, but the air in the upper
atmosphere is swirling outwards. Yeah, exactly. And so it's this
machine and it's all powered by the energy from the ocean.
And so that's why as the Earth warms up and

(18:06):
we get more hot spots and hotter spots in the ocean,
we get more and more dramatic hurricanes. And I guess
it's due to these currents too, because I guess you
need warm water under cold air, right, So it like
as the warm water, you know, moves under cold air,
then it creates these low pressure points. M exactly. It
warms up the air and the air rises, and then

(18:28):
you get this low pressure center. So you know, in general,
the idea of hurricane is this flow, this cyclic flow
of the air and this low pressure center. All right, well,
let's get into whether or not something like that can
happen out in outer space, maybe in other planets or
in our galaxy. But first let's take a quick break. Right,

(19:01):
we're talking about space hurricanes and whether or not those
are actually a thing. I guess there are a thing
that I know if we're asking the question what is
a space hurricane? So it might be a thing. Right.
It would be a short podcast if we were just
saying no, you can tell, because otherwise we would have
titled this episode do space hurricanes exist? Right? But here
we are asking what is a space hurricaine? So I
think we spoiled a little bit. If they do exist,

(19:23):
there are a thing. But I guess the question is
how does that happen? How do you get a hurricane
in space? Yes, so this basic mechanism that we're talking
about can exist in other places, other places where you
have something like air that can flow, and then you
have some source of energy to like pump into that
to create this low pressure center. And so you have
lots of places, actually in the Solar System we know about,

(19:45):
and then probably in the rest of the universe where
you get similar structures that are forming not necessarily out
of air and water droplets. But the structure of a
hurricane turns out to be something we see all over
the place, really not necessarily with water, but maybe other
science of storms. Yeah, exactly, with other kinds of storms.
You know, around the Solar System, we have atmospheres with

(20:05):
methane and all sorts of other crazy stuff in them,
And so we can take the same idea of a
hurricane and use it to understand storms on other planets
or moons. I guess the other planets are spinning and
they have some kind of atmosphere, so why not, right,
they could have hurricanes to Yeah exactly, But wait, don't
you need the oceans to like the moving oceans and

(20:26):
currents and things like that. Well, you really just need
sort of like bands, right, You don't necessarily need an ocean.
You just need something underneath it to provide the energy,
something to power this thing. And so you know, you
could have like hot rocks or other bands of denser gases.
You don't necessarily need a liquid ocean of water. You
don't need like the moving currents of water, right, because

(20:47):
that's that's kind of why hurricanes move, isn't it or
is it just due to the weather. Well, motion of
the hurricanes on other planets will see is a little
bit different than it is on Earth. That they don't
necessarily crash into shores the way they do on Earth,
but they're definitely formed and there can be a lot
more stable. Sometimes these storms on other planets can last
for hundreds of years. All Right, we'll step us through here.

(21:08):
What are some of the interesting hurricane type of storms
that we see in other planets? Well, sort of the
most boring are the ones on our neighbor planet Mars.
Mars does have big storms on it, so we don't
understand them exactly how they work, but we have seen
cyclones on Mars. Mostly these things are dust storms, and
they're not as dramatic as the hurricanes on Earth, mostly

(21:30):
because the atmosphere on Mars is just a lot lower pressure.
You know, there's just not that much atmosphere, so you
don't get as many dramatic events. Like the winds in
storms on Mars blow up to maybe a hundred kilometers
per hour, which is not nearly as dramatic as hurricanes
here on Earth. It's sort of like a slow motion,
mild kind of hurricane. Yeah, exactly. But we are watching

(21:52):
the atmosphere of Mars pretty carefully. We have a lot
of satellites in orbit around it. And in April of
scientists saw this huge cyclone near the north pole of Mars.
It was eleven hundred miles wide and had these big
cloud bands and it spun around and it dissipated after
several hours. It was the Mars Santa Claus who was like, no, no, no, no,

(22:14):
no, no no, hurricane here in Mars. Yeah, and it's not
something that we have seen since. And we are watching
the Martian atmosphere, so it's something we're looking to understand
because we're always wanting to get a better understanding of
what's in the atmosphere of Mars and what the dynamics
of it are. But you know, the same basic idea,
you know, something must have heated up the center of
this thing to create the rising air from the center,

(22:35):
which flew outwards and then spun because of the spinning
of Mars. What about other planets have we seen cyclones
in like Saturn? We have. Saturn, of course, has an
amazing storm. There's this storm on its north pole which
is in the shape of a hexagon. We did a
whole fun podcast episode about like what is going on there?
How do you get a hexagon shaped storm on the

(22:57):
north pole of Saturn that's been there for a long
time time and it's like twenty five thousand kilometers wide, So, like,
this thing is a monster. But not just its north pole.
It has these spots on it that are these like
massive planets circling storms. They don't last that long, but
they can impact the atmosphere and the temperature of the

(23:18):
planet for quite a while. So there are these great
white spots on Saturn that scientists think have the same
fundamental mechanisms as hurricanes here on Earth. Interesting now, because
I guess Saturn is sort of a gas planet, right,
It's mostly gas, and so it must have all kinds
of currents and layers of gas swirling and bands and
things like that exactly, and so you have these layers,

(23:40):
and so when a deeper layer has a hot spot
in it, it can create a low pressure center in
the band above it, right, which creates exactly the same
effect as we see here on Earth. And so we
don't understand a lot of the mechanisms that the internals
of Saturn, mostly because we haven't had a chance to
probe it. Remember Cassini did it like death dive into
Saturn and give us measurements about what was going on

(24:01):
inside of it. But mostly Saturn has been unexplored, so
we have to just observe it from the outside. And
that's why asking these questions like do we understand how
the storms form? Do we understand the mechanisms of it?
Can we extrapolate from the things we have learned on
Earth is a really good way to try to build
a model of what's going on in Saturn, so we
can ask if it makes sense or if there are

(24:23):
surprises inside. Interesting now here that Saturn has a record
for the longest continuous storm in the Solar System, Yeah
that's right, not necessarily just a hurricane, but there was
a thunderstorm on Saturn that lasted for over eight months.
Cassini observed it back in two thousand nine, and we
measured the strength of this thunderstorm by measuring the radio

(24:45):
emissions from its lightning. Right, every time you have a thunderstorm,
you have lightning, and lightning, of course, is an electromagnetic phenomena,
which means it creates radiation. I mean, what you're seeing
is radiation from the lightning, So there's also radiation in
other frequent seas of light, including the radio. You can
detect thunderstorms in radio waves. That's why it interferes with radio,

(25:05):
of course. And this one was ten thousand times stronger
than storms we see here on Earth and lasted for
eight months, So that's pretty dramatic. So really hunker down
if you're in a storm on Saturday. I guess technically
that wasn't a cyclone. It was just a big thunderstorm,
like clouds crashing into each other. Yeah, exactly, that was
not a cyclone. Alright. What about the big guy in

(25:26):
our solar system, Jupiter, That must have a lot of
cyclones because it's a big gas giant exactly for the
same reason, and it has the biggest cyclones humanity has
ever discovered. In the Great Red Spot is basically a hurricane.
This thing we did a whole episode about it. Remember,
it's been seen by astronomers for hundreds of years, and
so we know that this storm is at least three

(25:47):
hundred and fifty years old. It also boasts the fastest
winds in the Solar System, and so this is essentially
a huge hurricane on another planet. It's visible from Earth, right,
and it's read for some reason. Right. We talked about
it in a podcast episode. Yeah, although it's a really
fun mystery, and so digg into that whole episode if
you're curious about why the Great Red Spot is read,

(26:10):
and also why the Great Red Spot is shrinking, Yeah,
check that out please. And something else and just think
about Jupiter is that it has a lot of cyclones,
but they're not regular cyclones. Yeah, Jupiter turns out has cyclones,
but mostly it has anti cyclones. Anti cyclones are not
like anti matter. It's not like if a cyclone meets
an anti cyclone, they annihilate. It's a cyclone that has

(26:32):
the opposite sort of structure because it has high pressure
center instead of a low pressure center, and so the
winds actually go the opposite direction. Like on Earth, if
you have a cyclone in the northern hemisphere, it spins
counter clockwise. If you had an anti cyclone in the
northern hemisphere, it would spin clockwise, and so on Jupiter,

(26:54):
most of these things are actually anti cyclones. Interesting, meaning
like it's a high pressure center somehow, like maybe the
bottom layer is colder and then that pushes air away somehow. Yeah,
I would have to have like the air sinking in
the center exactly, like if you have a cold spot,
then it's pulling the air in and sinking it down
towards the center, and so that creates a pattern of winds,

(27:17):
and it also spins again because of the spinning of Jupiter.
So again, this is something that's like on the forefront
of our knowledge. Space meteorologists and planetary scientists are trying
to understand the dynamics of Jupiter's atmosphere. And that's a
tough thing to do from so far away with very
limited instruments. So it's a tough science. Yeah. I can't

(27:37):
imagine it's hard enough here to monitor the weather, imagine
doing it a million miles away. All right, Well, what
about other planets in the Solar System? What other interesting
cyclones can we find. Yeah, Neptune has a great dark spot.
It seems like on other planets we call these things spots, right,
I guess, just because that's what they look like from space.

(27:58):
But I feel like it undersells them in mas It
feel like a stain in your laundry instead of this
like mammoth atmospheric event with incredible power and destructiveness. But
Neptune has a great dark spot. Must have spilled coffee
on itself or something, and it features winds a fifteen
hundred miles per hour and it rotates around the planet
every eighteen hours or so. This thing in the southern

(28:20):
hemisphere of Neptune is the same size as the Earth. Wow,
that's crazy, Like you could fit the Earth inside of
the storm, I know. And it's sort of like the
unloved cousin of the Great Red Spot, because the Great
Red Spots pretty big, but it's not that much bigger
than the Great dark Spot. The Great Red Spots like
a hundred and thirty percent the size of the Earth,
so it's only a little bit bigger. But nobody talks

(28:42):
about the Great Dark Spot and all the destruction it's achieved.
Do you feel like the Earth, maybe this feeling left out,
like maybe the Earth wishes it had a tattoo, just
like Jupiter Neptune. I don't think we wish the Earth
had any big spots like that who plowed throughout civilization. Well,
I guess there does have a big stain at it.
It's called humans jazz kidding, I'm looking forward to that movie,

(29:02):
a human hurricane. All right, Well, what about some of
the other planets, anything in our inner Solar system? Yeah,
So Mercury actually has a really really fin atmosphere, so
there aren't really storms to speak of in terms of winds,
But it has a crazy magnetic field, and also it's
very close to the Sun. It interacts with its magnetic field,
and so it has these things called magnetic tornadoes, which

(29:25):
are sort of related. What. Yeah, you get these bundles
of magnetic fields and magnetic field lines can twist and eventually,
when there's too much strain on them, they can snap
and then like realign, and so this sort of causes
something similar because these magnetic fields push charged particles, and
when they spin and twist, they can push particles sort

(29:47):
of in a circular pattern, and so you get these
magnetic tornadoes. Where it's sort of like you know the
Northern lights, which are just charged particles moving around magnetic fields,
except you get these sort of spinning patterns of the
charge particles on mercury. Whoa, but you call that one
a tornado. That's different than a maybe a cyclone or
a hurricane. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have like the same

(30:08):
sort of low pressure center. It's just this sort of
like sheer effect that's creating this spinning due to the
magnetic fields, I guess. And you have the same sort
of thing happening actually on the Sun. On the Sun,
you have these like really huge towers of plasma being
ejected from the center and all these tangled magnetic fields
because these charged particles moving really fast, which gives you

(30:30):
magnetic fields, and so you get these huge towers with
tangled magnetic fields, and sometimes those magnetic fields get strained
and then they snap and realign and you get the
same sort of effect. These are called solar tornadoes, but
they don't actually spin. People thought for a long time
these things also spun and give you these like weird patterns,
but they're just these sort of like long towers of

(30:52):
plasma that are like several times the size of the Earth.
So they're not spinning, but they are maybe swirling, right,
that's what makes us call them tornado. Yeah, I don't
think they're even swirling. I think people fought for a
while they might be swirling, and they applied this phrase
solar tornadoes to them before they understood that they're not spinning,
and then later measurements show that they don't actually rotate.

(31:14):
So probably they should be downgraded from solar tornado to
just like solar massive tower of plasma, but they still
have the name. I don't know which one has a
better movie like a name, Solar Power Giant Tower of
Doom or solar Tornado. All right, well that's on the
planets and in our Solar system. Now let's talk about

(31:36):
possible hurricanes in actual space, because I feel like these
are hurricanes, but they're in other planets, so they're technically
not in space. I mean there's space relative to us,
but not to like Saturn in Jupiter. Yeah, there's sort
of extraterrestrial hurricanes. All right, Well let's get into actual
hurricanes in space. But first let's take another quick break.

(32:08):
All right, we're trying to come up with the next
great movie for the Discovery Channel and the Weather Channel. Daniel,
any interesting names that we come up with in the
break dark matter typhoon. Daniel and Jorge get eaten by
dark matter sharks, but then it gets saved by regular
matter dinosaurs. Why would regular matter dinosaurs come and save us.

(32:29):
They're still mad that we took over the planet when
the afteroid hit. They left it to us. Colan. It
could just be the vegetarian dinosaurs. I think those died
out pretty quick. Yep, you gotta eat a lot of
salad if you're a dinosaur. Let me tell you. All right, Well,
let's get into whether or not we can have weather
in space. I think we had an episode about weather

(32:49):
in space, but this one today we're talking specifically about
hurricanes in space. Space weather in general mostly refers to
what the Sun is doing, because the Sun generates a
solar wind, which is a stream of particles, or the
Sun is not just a ball of plasma that generates
heat and photon, It also shoots out protons and electrons
and all sorts of other stuff, neutrinos, all sorts of

(33:12):
stuff the products of the fusion going on at its center,
and that solar wind is important and if you're out
there in space like you're a satellite, you have to
be careful because these things are like tiny bullets and
they can shred your electronics. And because the Sun is unpredictable,
solar weather is unpredictable, and like a solar storm leading
to a solar flare can really inundate our delicate electronics

(33:33):
with all sorts of particles. But what we're talking about
today is actually something quite different. It's a space hurricane,
you're right, is not the product of solar weather, but
actually something that's happening in the very very upper atmosphere
of Earth. So it's actually more like near space weather,
almost space weather. It's like right on the border between
Earth and space. Yeah, exactly, it's like near Earth space.

(33:55):
But you see this sort of same structure that we're
familiar with now of a hurricane, where you have this
like low pressure center and things rising and then of
course the spinning effect. And this is a fascinating study
from a university in China. This is done by Shandong
University in China, and they actually observed a hurricane over
the Earth's magnetic north pole. We're talking about really really

(34:16):
far up in the very upper atmosphere of Earth where
you have mostly just like charged particles whizzing around. So
basically where the atmosphere becomes a plasma, you know, where
it's like protons and electrons whizzing around in space. There's
not a lot of air there, or is this plasma
made from air? This plasma is made from air. But
also you know, like this is where the solar wind

(34:37):
hits the outer atmosphere, and so a lot of the
air molecules get ionized when the solar wind hits them,
and so would you have up there's a lot more
charged particles than you have down here on Earth. What
they saw was this thing they call a space hurricane
because you have this circulation, but instead of in air
with water droplets, it's in plasma and the precipitation are

(34:59):
electron So this is a space hurricane in plasma raining electrons.
What raining electricity? Basically yeah, exactly, not like lightning, right.
Electricity is like the motion of energy through electrons. Right
as energy gets passed along a chain of electrons. Here
the electrons themselves are actually shooting, going really really fast

(35:23):
up to like ten thousand killer electron bolts, which is
like not nearly as fast as we have the large
hadron collider, but it's a huge, massive number of electrons,
and so these things get pulled up and then rain
back down. Now, this is like different than the Northern lights, right, Like,
this is different than what's going on with the solar
wind hitting the atmosphere. This is like stuff that's happening

(35:44):
with the ions and the electrons that are already floating
above the Earth. Yeah, this is a complex interaction of
the plasma at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and
the magnetic fields and how the Earth's magnetic fields interact
with the other magnetic field to round us. Right, Like,
we have our own magnetic field, and then there's the
Sun's magnetic field and the magnetic fields of all the

(36:05):
other objects that we're sort of flying through, and our
magnetic field lines sort of like add up with those
magnetic field lines to make a total magnetic field. But
because we're moving through that magnetic field, it gets complicated
and these magnetic field lines sort of snap and rearrange
sometimes and that creates this central vortex. This like spinning

(36:26):
magnetic fields, very similar to these magnetic tornadoes we talked
about our mercury, and the net effect is that it
accelerates electrons upwards. It pulls them up so effectively makes
a low pressure region at the center where it's low
pressure in terms of like fewer electrons are there, and
so then the other electrons around rush in and then
that creates a swirl. That's exactly it. So the other

(36:49):
electrons rushed in and then everything rises up. In this case,
it's powered by this magnetic field vortex instead of like
you know, warm ocean waters, but the structure is the same.
And that's the thing I find really fascinating that this
basic mechanism of a hurricane you see in lots of
different places. As long as you have these basic ingredients,
you know, something to power it, create a low pressure center,

(37:11):
and then on a spinning planet, you'll end up with
this spinning effect. And that's exactly what they see. But
these are not that common, and so this one particular
storm was seen in two thousand and fourteen. With satellite observations.
There's this awesome device called the Special Sensor Ultra Violet
Spectrographic Imager or SUSY to its friends, Sassy or SUSY.

(37:34):
I'll let you decide how to pronounce it. I'm not
sure how the scientists who work on to pronounce it.
So this was that somebody took a picture of this
space hurricane with plasma and raining electrons. They took a
picture of it with a satellite. Yeah, exactly, because it radiates. Right,
anytime you have charged particles accelerating, they radiate photons, and
so we can see this anywhere in the universe electrons

(37:55):
are being bent or accelerated, they will give off photons,
and this is a great way to see how particles
are moving through space and what's going on. So this
satellite detexts in the ultra violet the radiation of these
electrons trapped in this space hurricane, and so they were
able to see it. And so if you google space hurricane,
you can see this awesome picture of really the spinning

(38:15):
vortex and it's got these lines and everything. But it's
sort of similar to the Northern lights right in that
these are charged particles that are moving along magnetic field
lines and they are giving off radiation. But instead of
just being these long bands, it really is this spiral
with various arms. Did you see it with the naked
eye or is it that you can only see it
with the satellite. You definitely couldn't see it from the surface.

(38:37):
I don't know if it gave off radiation in the
visible light, but it was definitely strongest in the UV
and I think that's because these very high energy electrons.
It's a very high frequency radiation. I guess the question
is why did they call it a space hurricane and
not a space typhoon or space cyclone? Is it because

(38:57):
it's technically in the northern hemisphere. I space hurricane just
has the right ring to it, right. Hurricane just sounds
more dramatic than typhoon or cyclone, space cyclone, cosmic cyclone.
You see that extra You should have been in the
room pitching these ideas. So this thing is pretty awesome.
It's a thousand kilometers wide. It's not something that happens

(39:18):
very often. This one lasted about eight hours before it dissipated,
and we haven't seen another one, and so it's something
scientists are on the lookout for because we're looking to
understand like, are these hurricanes really universal phenomenon? Do they
exist all over the universe in various kinds of forms,
in water, in methane, in electrons. That's really fascinating to

(39:39):
know that we could like take our knowledge of what's
happening here on Earth and use it to understand the
weather on other planets around other stars. Interesting, like if
it can happen here, it can happen in other places,
and you know the way it happens, it can maybe
tell us about what's going on in those layers of
clouds and gases and other planets. Because we spent a

(39:59):
lot of energy right now trying to understand hurricanes, not
just because we want to predict them so that we
can keep people safe because we know where they're gonna land,
but because they're an example of something that's really difficult
to talk about, really difficult to calculate. You talked earlier
in the podcast at the very beginning about chaos, and
they are a great example of chaos. Like we understand
the basic rules of everything that goes on inside a hurricane.

(40:21):
There's no mystery there, there's no like magic happening. It's
all just water droplets and air moving. But it's still
very difficult to predict when a hurricane will form and
what it will do because it's very very sensitive to
tiny little details, a small change and how it started
can mean a big change and where it landed, and
that makes it difficult to handle for our computers. So

(40:43):
some of the most powerful computers in the world right
now are spending their cycles trying to understand what's going
on inside of hurricane. It's a great example of a
chaos problem. You know, even if particle physicists solid string theory,
it doesn't mean we could predict where hurricanes will land.
It's sort of like a problem at aff for in scale.
So if we can figure this kind of stuff out,
if we spend our energy understanding hurricanes here on Earth,

(41:05):
it might very well help us understand whether on alien planets.
You mean, like if you get good at modeling how
gases and liquids and fluids basically work right, and what
they can do, and we can predict how they're going
to move together. That's right. We need a string theory
of hurricanes, or you can string together a theory of hurricanes.
As long as we don't get a string of hurricanes

(41:27):
that would be pretty dangerous. Just take that sharpie and
move them out of the way, all right, Well, that's
pretty cool space hurricanes. They do happen in other planets,
and also in the upper atmosphere, now, Daniel, I guess
the question we sort of asked at the beginning was,
you know, can this same phenomenon happen out there in
like outer space, like between stars, between galaxies. You know,

(41:50):
if you have like a cloud of gas and dust,
can it form a hurricane? Maybe out there in space.
I suppose it's possible. You know, you need some sort
of energy source that can create like a low pressure region.
But we do have big clouds of gas and dust
out there, and they're heated by supernova and all sorts
of other stuff, and so in the dynamics of those
turbulent clouds there potentially could be hurricanes forming, right, or cyclones,

(42:13):
space cyclones, whatever you want to call them. They're awesome
in their destructive power, all right. Well as always keep
an eye on the weather, because they can tell us
a lot about Earth, about physics, about gases and ions,
and just help us a little bit more understand how
things work in the universe. And I find its heartening

(42:35):
to know that the things we learned here are on
Earth can be translated to other places in the Solar
System and other places in the universe. That human science,
all of our knowledge might help us crack problems on
other planets. They will know whether to bring an umbrella
or not to set an or Neptune. Definitely bring an
umbrella and a space suit made out of diamonds. Hopefully

(42:56):
all right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and
remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for my
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(43:20):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.