What's In Jupiter's Great Red Spot?

What is the Eye of Jupiter?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, or sometimes I like to think about what it
would be like to get a visit from future scientists
who come with like answers to some of our biggest questions.
Oh man, I mean like how did the universe form?
Or how big is it? Or who's going to be president?
Yeah exactly. I want to know the answer to those questions,
and I expect them to have it. But sometimes that

(00:29):
makes me kind of nervous. Nervous. Why do you feel nervous,
because then I feel pressure. I imagine like if I
went to visit ancient scientists, then I'd be on the
spot to answer their questions about the universe. Is that
like a physics professor's recurring nightmare going up against a
rout full of people and not having the answer to
something that's right, I'm talking to Plato and I'm wearing

(00:51):
nothing under my toga Um. Yeah exactly. But but the
reason I worry about is that sometimes I feel like
we still don't have answers to some of their questions.
You mean, like simple questions that maybe they had back then.
You feel like we still don't even know the answer
to them. Yeah, Like if you could go talk to Galileo,
you know, who looked at the moons of Jupiter. I'm

(01:12):
sure he would have a lot of questions about their
solar system, and some of them we have answers to,
and some of them are still open questions. That's a
bit embarrassing. Yeah, I think I know what you mean
of heard that there is a big mystery right here
in our solar system that is literally staring at us.
That's right. We don't have an answer to We stare
in it and it stares back. Hi am forhand and

(01:52):
I'm Daniel, and welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge
Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio where
we think about how to answer question into the universe,
questions in the future, questions in the past, questions from today,
questions from tomorrow, any questions you have about the universe.
We are here to explain the answers to you. That's right.
In this program, we talked about the big questions and

(02:13):
the little questions, and the big isar questions, that's right.
We talked about the calm questions and the stormy questions,
the red hot, red hot, burning questions people have. That's right.
But this is not a podcast about stormy Daniels. Now
this is a podcast about other kinds of storms, that's right. Yeah.
So to the end of program, we thought we would

(02:34):
tackle a question that was discovered a long time ago
by scientists, but for which we still don't have an answer.
That's right, an open question people are still wondering about.
We might not get an answer today, might not tomorrow,
might be another hundred years before we figure this one out. Yeah,
but hopefully we'll find the answer before it shrinks to nothing.

(02:56):
That's right. And this one really does hearken back to
folks Galileo who first peered through their telescopes and looked
out at the sky and studied Jupiter. And when they
looked at Jupiter, they saw something pretty strange. They saw
that Jupiter was staring back at them. That's right. If
you've looked through a telescope, then you've noticed that Jupiter
has a big spot on it, right. Yeah. But of

(03:18):
course people have been thinking about this and wondering about
this for generations. It's not a new question, right. And
we received this question actually from one of our younger
listeners just the other day. So to introduce you to
today's topic, here's Judah Hi, my Nami Judah. I'm from
Los Angeles, California, and I really enjoy listen to your podcast,

(03:41):
and I have a question. My question is how did
Jupiter's eye form to other planets have eyes? That's right,
the Great Red Spot of Jupiter one of the most
prominent feature is on any object in the Solar System,

(04:03):
and we still don't really know what it's all about.
Mm hm. That's an interesting way to categorize it. It's
like to be the biggest feature ever or right, It's
like a it's a good thing on a thing, but
it's so big that it's the biggest feature on anything
that we know about. That's right. That makes it it's
it's not even a thing in itself. Right, it's a
thing on another thing, and it's still huge, and it's

(04:24):
still a mystery. And to give people a sense of
the scale, you know, the Great Red Spot in Jupiter
is like one or two times the size of the
entire Earth. Right, this is not like a little detail
on some other planet. We're not talking about a rock
on the Moon or something. We're talking about a huge
astronomical feature. When we have you guys, do a quick

(04:45):
image Google search for the eye of Jupiter, and so
you get a sort of a better sense of what
we're talking about, that's right, Or if you don't have
the Internet handy, you just use your mind's eye and
remember what it looks like. Imagine what Jupiter looks like.
It's got all these bands across it, a little swirling
dots in it, but then on the southern part of it,
the bottom half of it, it's got this big red spot.

(05:05):
And imagine that you're an astronomer. You're one of the
first people who look at Jupiter. Of course you're gonna wonder, like,
what's that? Right? What is that thing? What's going on there?
Is that made artificially? Is it natural? How could it
be natural? What could it be? There's so many questions
inspired by this one astronomical feature. And the thing that
I love about it is that we still don't know
that it's still, you know, staring back at us and

(05:27):
resisting all of our efforts to understand it. Right, Yeah,
because it's a it's kind of an eyesore, I mean
to plunts aside. The whole planet is sort of like
beige and brown, but then it has this ginormous really
red like not a little red, but like pretty red
giant spot. It's so you don't like it. You think
Jupiter should wear makeup. It's like a big ZiT on

(05:48):
the face of Jupiter. Maybe that's what it is. I
have Jupiter. Maybe Jupiter is a teenager, right, and it's
so embarrassed and it doesn't want to talk about it,
and now it's mad at Jupiter and one day it's
gonna pop. It's gonna pop. No, I think it's gorgeous.
I love the patterns and the swirls. I mean, imagine
if Jupiter was just like blank, you know, it's just

(06:10):
like one big sort of gray mush, you know, it
would be so boring. I love the texture and the features.
And Jupiter is fascinating because it inspires all these questions
and it's an opportunity to learn and and just aesthetically,
I think it looks pretty cool. I think you should
have more spots on yourself or hey, how do you know?
I don't know, but I guess what I mean. It's
it's like a very defined feature, you know what I mean.

(06:32):
It's like not a diffuse, you know, like um spot.
It's not like a you know, like somebody spray painted
and it's fuzzy on the size. It's like a has
a border and an edge, and it's in a very
sharp red You're you're exactly like there's real contrast there
between the red spot and the stuff immediately next to it, right,
So it's it's definitely its own thing, right and that

(06:55):
that and that raises a lot of questions right there. Well,
and you're saying it's the size of two earths, like
you could fit two of our planets in that spot. Yeah,
And if you ever wanted to feel small and insignificant,
you know, are your tiny compared to our planet? And
our planet is tiny compared to just features on other planets,
you know, not even other planets, just like stuff on

(07:16):
those planets. So there are pimples and other planets that
are bigger than our planets, that's what you're saying. That's right. Um,
I don't know what what happened when you pop an
Earth size pimple. Um, Please don't don't imagine that, folks.
But yeah, exactly, it's amazing the skill, right, Like just
to go across this giant spot would be akin to

(07:39):
flying around the world, right, Yeah, exactly, Um, exactly, it's
huge and it's sort of got its own like um patterns,
you know, it itself. It rotates around Jupiter. It takes
six days to go around Jupiter. The spot itself moves
around what it moves Yeah, well it's spins, right, It rotates,

(08:00):
and then the spot itself moves around Jupiter. Jupiter has
all these bands of gas are flowing in different directions,
and this spot goes around Jupiter. Takes about six earth
days to make one transit, so it's not tied to
the to those hard surface of Jupiter. It's like a
floating spot. Well, we can get into that, but we
don't actually know that much about what's under the red

(08:22):
spot and how deep it goes and it's connection to
what's underneath that. A lot of that is a mystery
because Jupiter is a hot and wet and nasty place
and pretty difficult to study. Wow, all right, let's get
into it. But first, as usual, we were wondering how
many people out there knew the answer or thought they
had the answer to the question what's in Jupiter's red spot? Yeah,
so I walked around the campus if you see Irvine,

(08:44):
and I asked them what they knew about Jupiter's red spot.
So think about it for a second and and think about, well,
how would you answer a random physics professors stopping in
the middle of the street ask the what is in
Jupiter's Red spot? Yeah? You would you take out your
pepper spray, would pull out your taser? Or would you
answer his questions? Do you take out your physics reference book?

(09:06):
That's right? That's right. So here's what folks on the E. C.
I campus had to say. What is in the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter? What's going on there in the
Great Red Spot of Jupiter? Oh? Something hot? Say it's
nasty and wet, No, but definitely hot. Yeah, um, I
have no Okay, probably some like plasma reactions. I don't know,

(09:31):
something something at like high temperature and like high freshure. Okay.
Isn't a tornado of some sorts, that's right, Yeah, a
very big one. Okay. No, I don't know. Okay, No,
I haven't looked into that. Okay. I think I've heard
some things about how there's storms going on in there
that might be causing that. It's like a storm of
some sort, right, like a like a never ending storm

(09:55):
or as far as we know, because it's been there
for a very long time, Um, and I think that's all.
I mean, I'm not quite sure that refers to but
it might just be like I know that there are
large dust storms on Jupiter. That might be to what
you're referring. And I understand the question, correct, rain, it
might be something like a gigantic supercell that's been raging
for many years on Jupiter and little Ridge for many

(10:16):
years in the future. All Right, some not safe for
work as is here. Let's just say there's a broad
variety of responses. Yeah, nobody said pimple. Though nobody called
it the ZiT on the face of Jupiter. I think
your theory is in trouble there, man. But no, I mean,
some people said it was something hot. I wonder what
they were thinking. Yeah, And another common theme is people

(10:38):
thinking of it is a storm like a dust storm, right.
I think they're imagining they're like the red sand on
Mars or something like that. Um, but a storm is
on the right track, right. It's definitely a huge swirling
mass of gas like a hurricane, right, very high winds,
and so a storm is is not a terrible answer.
A storm is pretty is a pretty good way to
describe it. Okay, So there's a general understanding out there

(11:00):
that it's kind of like a weather phenomenon or it's um.
It's swirling. It's not like, it's not that the rock
is painted red under there, that's right. Yeah, it's not
a huge piece of art on the on the surface
of Jupiter or anything. It's um. Yeah. I think people
are familiar with the fact that Jupiter is a gas planet, right,
So we're not looking at the surface in the same
way that we look at the surface of Mars. When

(11:22):
we look at Jupiter, there isn't the surface there for
us to see. We're looking at sort of the top
of the Jovian atmosphere, and what we're seeing is a
big swirling mass. And so I think it's thinking about
his weather is is a good way to think about it. Alright,
So let's let's start with some basics. Well, let's talk
about Jupiter and what that planet is like. Yeah, so

(11:43):
let's start from the inside out right, So, and compared
to Earth, Earth, as we know, is like a big
rocky ball with hot, nasty stuff on the inside and
then a very thin atmosphere surrounding it, Jupiter is really
pretty different. It has a rocky, icy core. We think
but it's pretty small, and it's mostly a huge ball
of hydrogen, and the hydrogen is under such pressure from

(12:05):
all the gravity from Jupiter being so massive that the
hydrogen is not like the hydrogen you imagine, like the
big tank of gas or something. Most of Jupiter is
this huge ball of metallic hydrogen, right, hydrogen that's been
squeezed and so much that it's turned into a metal.
And then on top of that you have a liquid
hydrogen ocean. Right, And this is not something you ever

(12:28):
wanted to put a swimsuit on and dive into and
be a little chili. No, I think it'd be really hot. Actually,
I think it's a it's liquid and it's under high
pressure and temperature, so it's a it's a pretty crazy
place to be, but not nasty and wet. That's subjective,
so I'll defer that to the first person to actually
swim in the oceans of Jupiter. And then on top

(12:49):
of that liquid ocean, you have gaseous hydrogen. You have
just like hydrogen that we're more familiar with. And then
on top of that you have clouds that are like
maybe thirty miles deep. So it's so it's like a
layer cake of different flavors of hydrogen. Like the more
compressive gets it, it actually first turns liquid and then
it actually turns into like solid hydrogen. Is that what

(13:10):
you're saying that it actually forms like a solid hydrogen
like a block of hydrogen. Wow, not exactly. It is metallic,
but it's probably still liquid. It's not so much pressure
that it becomes a solid. Layer cake is a good example,
because the stuff on the bottom gets squeezed by all
this stuff on the top. So this is a layer
cake with like a gazillion tons of frosting, so that

(13:30):
the bottom layer has become like squished. Is no longer
fluffy at all? Right, it's poll from the British Baking
Show would say, it's like it's underbaked. But then, how
how big is that solid core in the middle, Like,
is it it's still pretty big or is it bigger
than the Earth? It's a it's a little bit bigger
than the Earth. It's about the same scale as the Earth. Um.

(13:51):
The biggest fraction of of Jupiter is definitely that metallic
hydrogen part. Oh wow, So really at the core Jupiter
is kind like about the size of Earth. It just
has a lot of icing on it exactly. Yeah, m
millions of Earth's worth of icing exactly. That is a
huge tub of icing, of cosmic galactic icing exactly. But

(14:16):
the surface, at the very surface that we see, that's
all clouds. Yeah, And I wouldn't even call it a surface.
You know, we're seeing the tops of the clouds and
it's not a surface because you can't like land on it.
You know, you could descend into it. And we once
did drop a probe into Jupiter, but it got melted
and crushed before it even got down through the cloud layer.
Oh wow, just from the craziness of that. Those clouds. Yeah,

(14:38):
even just those clouds are very high temperature and pressure. Well,
but but that cloud layer you're telling me is about
thirty miles deep, yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of clouds.
I mean, Jupiter is just massive on this scale. It's
even hard to imagine, like when you think about planets,
and so it's it's a huge pile of clouds. There's
a lot of stuff going on there. And you know,

(14:59):
when you think about web there, right, whether is something
that happens in the atmosphere, right, because you have these
gas moving around, interacting and thirty miles deep of clouds
means you can have lots and lots of layers. You know,
here on Earth we have like weather in the upper atmosphere,
in the lower atmosphere, right, Jupiter has so much more
atmosphere and clouds than we do that there could be
complexities there that we've never seen, that we've never imagined.

(15:19):
And that's one of the fascinating things about studying Jupiter
is it might give us a clue as to bigger
questions about whether or what weather might be like on
exoplanets and other solar systems we hope to one day
have our children live on. So it's a pretty important
place to to study how these things work because our
only experience of weather is here on Earth, and if
we think about it, we just have this tiny little

(15:40):
layer of gas too. To understand how all these things
swirl around and how they get affected by the Sun
and the Earth spinning rights, it's um. We have a
very small sample to understand, whether exactly and um. And
so that's why they send satellites up to study the
atmosphere Jupiter and the weather inside Jupiter and know even
the storm aside. Even if Jupiter didn't have the great

(16:03):
red Spot. It would already be a place of crazy weather.
Like there are lightning strikes on Jupiter that are more
than a thousand times larger, like more energetic than lightning
strikes on Earth. You know, imagine like a thousand lightning
strikes simultaneously, all in the same place. That's like everyday
occurrence on Jupiter. You mean, like a like a single
bolt of lightning, and Jupiter is about a thousand times

(16:25):
more powerful in a lightning strike on Earth. Yeah, exactly.
It's like everything on Jupiter is more dramatic. You know,
I bet birthday parties in Jupiter are much more impressive
than birthday parties are well apparently Zit's are also very
much more I bet their jokes are funny, you know,
they're probably much more jovial. Um. Okay, So so that

(16:48):
so things are more extreme because it's so so much
atmosphere so thicker, so much thicker, hotter and crazier. Um.
And so that's kind of the picture of Jupiter. It's
like a little tiny rock core about the size of
our planet. But then you have all of those hydrogen
swirling around, swishing around. That's mostly what the planet is.

(17:09):
It's it's like a giant gas container swirling round. Yeah, exactly.
And and remember that most of the stuff in the
Solar system is hydrogen, because that's the simplest element. It's
most of the stuff in the universe for the same
reason it's just a proton with the electron around it
a right. The Sun is mostly hydrogen for that same
reasons that Jupiter's mostly hydrogen. It's just most of the
stuff around. The basic building block was hydrogen, so that's

(17:31):
why it's hydrogen. And Jupiter is sort of like a
star that never got started burning, which is why I
can't fuse to make heavier stuff. But the thing that's
interesting to me is that, you know how we have
weather patterns on Earth, like we have the jet stream
and you know these various winds that are sort of
basically stable. The same kind of stuff happens on Jupiter.
And you can see it with your own eyes. If
you look at the surface of Jupiter, you see these bands, right, Like,

(17:53):
Jupiter is not just one big blob. It has these
bands on it. And these bands are basically just like
wind patterns, and they go one way or they go
the other way. There's like these you know, centuries long
stable weather patterns on the surface of Jupiter. That's really
pretty fascinating because the whole thing is rotating, right, Like,
it's not just a ball floating out in space. It's

(18:13):
spinning as well, isn't it. Yeah, exactly, it's definitely spinning.
And something we don't know very well. It's like, how
are the various parts spinning? You know, the atmosphere is spinning,
the ocean is spinning, the core underneath it is spinning.
We have a sense for what's in there from various
gravitational measurements, but we've never gone in there, so it's
hard to measure like how fast these things are moving.

(18:33):
We have some clues from like the magnetic field information,
but so one thing we don't know is how fast
these things are rotating relative to each other. You know,
Like we talked once about one of these moons could
have an outer ice shell that's rotating faster than the
inner core under the under the ocean. The same thing
could be happening in Jupiter. So there's a lot we
don't know about what's going on inside Jupiter. Inside, Like

(18:55):
if you just measured how the clouds moved on Earth,
you might get a totally for an idea of how
the Earth is actually rotating. Yeah, although Earth is not
covered in clouds the way Jupiter is, so you can
actually see the surface and you can measure, you can
spot something on the surface of the Earth and watch
it go by every twenty four hours. You can't do
that on Jupiter. You can't see the core of Jupiter
or this liquid ocean um. Like I said, we dropped

(19:17):
some probes and but they didn't even make it all
the way down before they got like melted and crushed,
and like Jupiter just like laughs away are pathetic attempts
to study it swatted it away like exactly. And so
the most interesting feature on the surface of Jupiter, of course,
is this great red spot, right and by now we've
studied it fairly extensively. You can see it from telescopes

(19:38):
on Earth, and we've sent this whole series of probes
that go by Jupiter, Pioneer Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, Galileo
and most recently the Juno probe, and they've taken really
amazing pictures of this. So you can tell that the
Great Red Spot is basically a huge storm. Wow, let's
jump right into the eye of the storm. But first
let's take a quick break. Alright, So Jupiter is just

(20:13):
a basically a giant ball of hydrogen in all kinds
of states, solid liquid gas, clouds, and the eye of Jupiter.
You're saying, it's just basically like a storm inside of
that giant weather ball. Yeah, exactly. It's basically a huge hurricane.
And you know, on Earth you can have big hurricanes

(20:35):
that are hundreds of miles wide. That's a pretty amazing event.
It's pretty rare, and you can get wind speeds up
to you know, a hundred hundred fifties sometimes in super
rare events up to like two hundred miles. Well, the
Great Red Spot has winds that go up to four
hundred miles per hour. And it's been going on for

(20:55):
you know, we don't know exactly how long, but much
more than a hundred years. Wait, you mean it hasn't
always been there, Like there was a time when you
could look at Jupiter and you wouldn't see a red spot. Well,
this is actually fascinating because we don't really have reliable information.
The earliest solid observation of the Great Red Spot in
Jupiter comes from like the eighteen thirties. Before that, there

(21:18):
are some folks Galileo and those guys who wrote about
Jupiter and said, oh, I see a spot on Jupiter.
But they weren't like really very detailed observations. They didn't
like tell us exactly what they saw and measured it
in stuff. And there's some hints in those writings that
suggests they might have seen a different spot, like on
the northern side of Jupiter. So it might be that
the Jupiter's red spot is like a couple hundred years old,

(21:40):
or it could be that it's been there for thousands
of years. We just don't have like a lot of data,
right Is it a birthmark or is it something that
happened in purity? You know, like it could be that
we go back to talk to Galileo or folks like
that and they don't even have this question because they've
never seen the Great Red Spot in Jupiter and they're like,
what do you talking about? Or it could be that

(22:01):
this has been around for our thousands of years and
and you know, it's a big question in their minds
as well. So it's it's sort of cool that we
don't know if this is like a transient thing that
exists only in these few decades and hundreds of years
that we're looking at Jupiter, or if it's a prominent feature.
That's a cool thing about thinking about that sort of
time scales of the Solar system, you know, like in
a million years, will Saturn still have rings? Will Jupiter

(22:22):
be identifiable? You know, this kind of thing. But that's
like their signature move, you know, that's like there, it's
in their logo, you know exactly. Well, if you're like
a teenager who had a lot of acne, that might
have been your signature, but then you kind of want
to grow out of it and you don't want to
be called like, hey remember you, I remember you. You
were that kid who had all that acne, right, you
want to leave it behind. So maybe Jupiter feels the

(22:43):
same way. Mm hmm. Well, I think it's it's interesting
to me that it's you call it a storm. It's
a storm because the whole planet is basically just a
giant cloud weather system. What makes it sort of a contain?
What makes something a storm in a planet where basically
the whole thing is kind of a storm? This description
hasn't made you want to like vacation to Jupiter or something.

(23:06):
There's no calm days on Jupiters. Yeah, that's a great question.
I think that the thing that makes it a storm
is that it's separate from the rest of the cloud system.
It's like self contained. Um, it eats. First of all,
it eats other storms. We've seen like smaller peony size storms,
storms like the size of huge hurricanes and Earth. They
this storm just like rolls over them and gobbles them up. What. Yeah,

(23:30):
systems got its own energy. Is that what it means
like it has its own kind of like you know,
perpetual kind of machine cycle something going on. It's kind
of like a bully. I don't know. It just like
sucks up the lunch money from other storms, right, And um, yeah,
so it eats other storms. It's self contained and it's separate.

(23:50):
There's a boundary there, right. You can see that. You
see these pictures from Juno. They're incredible, and there's the
winds that are circling and there's an edge to it,
after which you get these cloud bands and they're definitely different.
So it's it's separate from the rest of Jupiter. And
I would say that the the other thing that makes
it a storm is that the winds are faster like
they go. The winds they're four miles per hour, are

(24:11):
definitely faster than they are on the rest of Jupiter.
So it's the stormiest spot on Jupiter. If you were
going to vacation a Jupiter, I wouldn't recommend the Great
Red Spot unless you like like that kind of thing. Exactly,
windsurfing maybe, yeah, I don't know if you're super good
ultimate windsurfing, yeah, exactly. And um, you were asking earlier

(24:33):
about like is it connected to something underneath, And that's
a really good question. We don't don't know the answer. Um,
we've probed it a little bit using various techniques, and
we know that it goes like a hundred hundred fifty
miles down, so definitely penetrates down all the way through
the cloud layer and into the like the blob of
gashous hydrogen. But we don't know if it's connected to

(24:53):
something else going on, Like is it an indication that
there's some like tectonic activity inside Jupiter that's venting out
some heat that's fueling this thing, or is it just
a crazy weather pattern that happens to support itself. Like
the ideas are pretty broad still, which really still pretty clueless.
So it could be just something that floats basically, or

(25:14):
it could be something that is kind of connected to
the rocky center of Jupiter. Yeah, exactly the way like
storms on Earth, right, they get their energy usually from
the ocean, right, there's water and the heat from the ocean.
And that's why, for example, global warming makes on average
larger hurricanes because warmer water fuels these storms, and then
the storms sort of peter out when they run into

(25:36):
land because they can no longer get fuel because they're
they're not over the ocean anymore. Um, I see, you don't, like,
you don't get hurricanes in the middle of Africa or
through the middle of the US. You only get them
sort of in the you know, the the Caribbean or
in the middle of the Atlantic, right, that's right, And
that's why they tend to lose power when they hit land, right,

(25:57):
their most ferocious just when they hit the the the beaches,
and then they sort of peter out as they go
further and further inland. Um, thank gosh. But you know,
we don't know. Maybe in the future with climate change,
hurricanes are just going to rule the world. We don't know.
But there's no surface like that to slow down storms
on Jupiter. So we don't know what's fueling it. Is

(26:18):
there some like hot spot in the liquid ocean, liquid
hydrogen ocean that's connected to something We don't know if
it's just floating there. Yeah, it's a great question, But
what do you mean what fuels it? It needs energy
to keep going, and you're saying, we don't know where
that energy is coming from. Yeah, exactly. They've done some
thermal imaging, so they know that the center of it
seems to be warmer than the rest of it, But

(26:39):
they don't know if that's just some warm spot on Jupiter,
or if that's coming from underneath, right, if it's like
drawing energy from inside Jupiter, or maybe there's some like
alien civilization there that's pumping out some heat signature from
its fusion reactor. I mean, that's crazy speculation. But I'm
sure somebody has written that science fiction novel. I was
thinking that would make a cool title for about the

(27:00):
Eye of Jupiter. I'm sure I'm sure somebody has written
that book already. Oh oh man, sorry, every book you
we imagine somebody has ever written. You know, one time
in this podcast, I had an idea for a science
fiction story, and I speculated about it, and then somebody
send me an email saying, oh, that story has been written.
Here it is. So I'm pretty sure we're not coming

(27:21):
up with any new ideas on this podcast for science
fiction stories. That story has been written. I just wrote
it after I your podcast there is, and I'm suing you.
We're talking about it without giving me credit. I think
I think that means we've made it. Daniel. We have
fan fiction, now, that's right, Jorge versus the Banana. I'm
gonna read that fan fiction somebody out there right that story. Yeah.

(27:49):
So I think it's amazing that we just don't know,
like what caused this, you know, is this something that
was created by some crazy event? You know, like did
something hit Jupiter and impact a bunch of energy and
cause the storm, because you know, we've seen stuff hit Jupiter, right,
like back in the nineties, huge comet broke up and
hit Jupiter and it left some some spots on the

(28:10):
surface of Jupiter, but they didn't last, right, Those are
gone by now, right, But this is like a self contained, ongoing,
almost independent phenomenon that's happening on the on the big
clouds of Jupiter, right, yeah, exactly, And we know it's
been around for at least a hundred and fifty years.
But but it's not static, right, it's not unchanging. We've

(28:30):
been watching it now pretty carefully for a few decades,
and we see it changing. The weird thing is it
seems to be shrinking and it's going from like more
oval to more circular. That kind of blew my mind
here that it's it's not a permanent feature of Jupiter.
It might be like a transient, temporary thing that just
pops in and out. Yeah, it could be that you
tell your kids about this eye on Jupiter and they're like, whatever, Dad,

(28:52):
that's our crazy story. Jupiter doesn't have an eye on it,
you know whatever. We know it was aliens a few
or Daniel told us, I have a lot of questions
for future Daniel, Um, yeah, I got some numbers here.
Back in nineteen seventy nine, we measured it to be
about fifteen and a half thousand miles wide, and now

(29:14):
it's just under eight thousand miles wide. And yeah, so
it's it's a lot smaller than it used to be,
Like your Grandpa's great red spot. It's much more impressive
than yours. And that's not just your grandpa talking. That's real, Like,
that's data hit my days was much bigger than you guys. Yeah,

(29:36):
it's gonna be downgraded from the great Red Spot to
the pretty big red spot down to the red spot.
Maybe it's just very slowly blinking, you know, I was
thinking that also, it is shrinking. That doesn't mean necessarily
it's going to disappear. It could go down and then
it could come back up. Right, we have no idea
what's causing this thing, what the dynamics are, what the
mechanism is, so we can't really predict anything about it, right, Um,

(30:00):
And it's not like it's moving steadily. It was shrinking steadily,
but then between its shrunk really dramatically for a while.
We have no idea what happened there. Let's see what
happened in Um, Barack Obama got reelected. Thanks Obama. It's
a direct correlation here, exactly, A bunch of terrible movies

(30:24):
came out. Yeah, that's probably a yeah. All right, Well
let's get into the biggest question about the big Red Spot.
But first let's take a quick great all right, Dianiel,

(30:45):
here's the biggest question I have about the big red
spot in Jupiter, which is why is it red? I know,
I wish I knew the answer that question. Um, nobody
knows is the short answer. Right. We still don't know
what makes it red. And it's like a tiny bit red.
And this is not one of those things that astronomers
are like exaggerating and you check it out for yourself
and you're like, what, that's not too impressive. It's really

(31:08):
red because the rest of the planet is like paige brown,
pretty boring cold colors. I mean, you are so critical
of the aesthetics of Jupiter, man, come on, jupiters beautiful Jupiter.
I love you. I think I'm I'm praising its bold
choice of this red because you know, it's like, you know,
it painted the walls paige, but then it painted a

(31:28):
giant red thought in the middle of the of the
living room. Yeah, we don't know what makes it red.
It's fascinating, right, and it seems like it might not
be that hard to figure out. So scientists like said, oh,
maybe it's ammonium hyde sulfate, or it's this other chemical
or sad chemical, and so they try to reproduce it,
like reproduce the conditions of Jupiter in the lab and
see if they can make it glow red the same way,

(31:50):
but they couldn't. Some of the current ideas are like
cosmic rays or coming down and radiating it and making
it glow red, but people have tried that in the
lab also, and they just can't get it to glow
the right color of red. I feel like you just
took it up a notch in the mystery scale. Not
only do we know not know what is the j

(32:10):
what is Jupiter's red spot? We we don't even know
why it's red. Might not even be red. It's definitely red,
but yeah, why is it red? Not like purple or
blue or orange or something? Right? What's going on? It's
and the redness is so tantalizing because you know, red
really catches your eye. So it's not like it's a
beige spot on top of a white planet or something.
We just don't understand it. It's so bright and dramatic, right,

(32:33):
this this is a very very red spot. And so
something is going on there, and it's of interest to
you know, atmospheric physicists and scientists and weather scientists and
that kind of stuff because it gives us a clue.
It's like how these strooms form and what's going on
inside them. It seems like a really big clue. And
I know, Daniel that you can't resist a big red button.
If you see one, does this should have cantalize you

(32:55):
and makes you want to go to Jupiter and press
that big red button. I do want to go to
but yes, I would love to go visit the great
Red Spot. Thank you very much for offering to fund
my travel. I appreciate that. Quite a quiet invitation. There
she's going, I'll send you the check when you get there.
Just find charge you to um I Heart Media. I
think they're funding this operation. They like eyes, so they

(33:16):
know that's right. There's Jovian trip to the eye of Jupiter,
brought to you by I Heart Media. I would definitely
go and love to see it. And yet red attracts me.
You know. I sit in the control room of the
large head drunk collider with that big red cancel the
collider button, and yes I want to press it, and

(33:38):
I tempted to press it, and so in the same way,
I want to go see what's going on. It seems
like it's calling to us. Obviously, it's not maybe not
so obviously, but it seems like it's calling to us.
And I think it's fun that scientists want to figure
this out and that they can't. And uh, you know,
it's not just curiosity. We're going to be looking at
the atmospheres of lots of other planets. Pretty soon. We

(33:58):
have these amazing lescopes now, like tests and other telescopes
coming online that that will be able to image the
atmospheres of exo planets. That means taking pictures of planets
and other solar systems. And then we're gonna have questions.
We're gonna be like, what's going on there? Can we live? There?
Is there water in that atmosphere? You know? And the

(34:20):
best way to figure out how to do that is
to practice by looking at the stuff nearby. It's kind
of like those weather cams you know, where you they
show you what the weather's like in Palm Beach or
Santa Barbara or on the top of the mountain right
and you can see how which snow there is or
whether it's cloudy. You could be like, hey, that planet
looks pretty good, let's go over there exactly. And it's
the kind of thing you want to get right, because

(34:40):
you don't want to fly all the way over there,
spend twenty years and be like, oh whoops, turns out
there's a huge storm and not a nice beach planet.
So you definitely want to get this kind of thing right.
We want to understand weather systems on other planets. That
would be very helpful. What is it called exo weather
or astro weather, astro meteora gene maybe asterolog climatology after climatology.

(35:05):
I love that, yeah, exactly. And you know, as the
Earth heats up and our weather gets more and more extreme, um,
it may be helpful to see what weather patterns are
like on other planets as as our weather gets more
and more like there. Yeah, if we if we eat
the wrong things, we could get a big giant's in Also,
that's right here again you're blaming Jupiter's choices. See, you're

(35:28):
very judgmental about Jupiter in this podcast. All right, Jupiter,
we love you the way you are. You make your choices,
you know, that's fine. Um. I think Jupiter should be
very planet positive about itself, even though it is big
and round. Because it's round there there really aren't. You
don't want to be a slender planet. Now, that's for sure.

(35:49):
It does have a lot of gas, that's true. Um,
it wouldn't it be awesome if Jupiter was like a
second eye, and then that would really be wet. It's
like it's looking at us and that you're saying that
that's the amazing thing. It could happen because we don't
know what caused the first one, so it could just
generate generate a second eye. Yeah, and that kind of
thing does happen, like not on the scale of the

(36:09):
Great Red Spot, but recently there was a sort of
a smaller white spot that formed on the top side
of the planet and it lasted several years and then dissipated.
And so we don't know if like they just have
to have to get big enough and then they're stable,
or if there's something fueling it underneath. We really don't know.
I would love to watch Jupiter and sort of time
lapse footage over like a million years, right, to see

(36:32):
how these things evolve, because remember, we have to think
about these things on longer time scales. Right, what we're
looking at is like a slow motion video of gas
bouncing around um of swirling, swirling vapors, you know, on
the longer time scales, this could just be a blip,
or it could be something that's going to eventually grow
and take over Jupiter. Right, it could have had more

(36:53):
eyes in the past, right, Yeah, exactly, it could have
had more eyes as far as we know. Well, it's
pretty cool to think about the the idea that we
have all these mysteries right here in our backyard that
we have no idea about and that we may never
know and I mean that I could disappear before we
get the answer exactly. Our solar system is so full

(37:14):
of fascinating mysteries. You know, we're tempted to look out
on the grander scale and think about the history the
universe and how big is it? And is it accelerating?
And what is dark energy and all that stuff, But
we have a lot of mysteries in our backyard. You know,
why does Mars not have a magnetic field? Why is
Jupiter so crazy? Right? What happened in Neptune? What's going
on in the moons of Jupiter? Like, there's so many

(37:36):
things right here that we don't know the answers to,
And those questions are more fascinating because we're much more
likely to figure them out. You know, we can go
visit Jupiter. It's not that big a deal. We can
send probes to land on these these moons. Eventually we
can go visit the Great Red Spot. Like these questions,
we probably will get answers to, and that makes the
questions themselves to me much more exciting. Yeah, better go

(37:59):
before blink. That's right, before before somebody pops that ZiT.
All right, Well, thank you for joining us. That's been
our podcast for today. Thanks for listening, See you next time.

(38:21):
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
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email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For

(38:42):
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