May 16, 2026 • 40 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. What actually is this great storm? How has it changed during the short history of its human observation? Find out… (part 2 of 2) (originally published 5/13/2025)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This
is Robert Lamb. It's Saturday, of course, so we have
another vault episode for you. This is going to be
The Great Eye of Jupiter, Part two of two. It
originally published five thirteen, twenty twenty five. Let's jump in.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We are back with our second episode on the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter, and in the last episode we'll
get to sort of a rundown of what we talked
about last time. But one of the things we did
mention a few different times is how Jupiter does show
up in science fiction, oftentimes just as a backdrop, sometimes
in a more plot or fashion. But I was looking
(01:02):
around because I'm like, Okay, if I dive deeper into
written fiction, I'm sure there's some great hardcore Jupiter sci
fi that references the Spot. And sure enough, there's a
novella from Let's See nineteen seventy one. I believe the
original version of it was published in Playboy magazine, and
(01:23):
it's set in the year twenty fifty. It is titled
a Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Oh yeah, huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This
is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
It is? Yeah, this is a pretty famous one. I've
never read it, which is why it didn't, you know,
come to my mind immediately. And we may have referenced
it on the show in the past, but it was
a big one, was a Nebula Award winner, highly influential tale.
I wish I'd had a chance to read it in
full ahead of our recording, but I did go through
it and look for references to the Great Red Spot,
(01:57):
and there are actually a couple of them. Is kind
of bookended because I believe on the way in our
main character is sort of pining for a visit to
the Great Red Spot, and then later when he leaves, he's,
you know, he feels kind of bittersweet about it, and things, well,
maybe I'll see it next time.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism
of the story, but this did cause me to think,
would the Great Red Spot feel like the Great Red
Spot if you were in it instead of looking at
it from above, you know. Yeah, it's like imagining wanting
to go to an island, because the island is shaped
like something when seen from orbit, but like when you're
(02:34):
on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd
just be on land.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, it's like I love the shape of Australia. I
really want to visit it somedays so I can appreciate
its shape.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
But then again, I'm sure the Great Red Spot, like
you know, like many things on Jupiter would be, would
have fascinating local characteristics as well. It just wouldn't be
a Great Red Spot anymore. It would be whatever. I
don't know, wind's whipping around you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So this story can be obtained, I'd believe in it,
least in one major Arthur C. Clark collection, and certainly
go out and read it and fall right into us
if you have read in full, if you have thoughts
on it. But I want to read one quick passage
from it that references the Great Red Spot. Quote. The
Great Red Spot itself, the most spectacular of all the
planet's features, lay thousands of miles to the south. It
(03:20):
had been a temptation to descend there, but the South
Tropical Disturbance was unusually active, with currents reaching over nine
hundred miles an hour. It would have been asking for
trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The
Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait
for future expeditions.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Wow, what a coincidence. I'm actually going to end up
in this episode talking about the South Tropical Disturbance. That's
not a thing made up for the Arthur C. Clark story.
That's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah. And it's also I mean, like how he's acknowledging
the mysteries of the Great Red Spot, because as we've
been discussing, there are plenty of mysteries that still remain about.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It, absolutely aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays
dwelling there.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah. So we're back to continue our discussion of the
Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a massive storm visible from
Earth by telescope. In the last episode, we discussed the
history of the spots observation in the telescopic age, beginning
in the seventeenth century and then with greatly improved imaging
capabilities in the twentieth century and beyond. We discussed how
(04:26):
the Great Red storm we know today might not be
the storm that Giovanni Cassini noted in sixteen sixty five,
and how the storm is long lasting compared to terrestrial storms,
but still a temporary atmospheric feature in the life cycle
of a planet, so it won't be there forever, but
we don't know when it will go away.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So regarding the observations in the eighteen hundreds, I don't
recall if this came up in the last episode. You
can remind me if I've forgotten this, Rob, But I
actually found out that there was a photo, a telescopic
photo of the Great Red Spot taken of Jupiter in
the nineteenth century. It was taken by Irish astronomer Agnes
(05:04):
Mary Clerk in eighteen seventy nine, and Rob I attached
a copy of this black and white photo for you
to look at in the outline. Here. You don't get
a lot of definition on the various bands going back
and forth like you see in the good color photos
of Jupiter today. Mainly it looks like one sort of
light gray ball with a big dark stripe in the
middle and then just a huge, gigantic elongated oval on
(05:30):
one side of the equatorial stripe, and apparently at the
time this photo was taken, it was estimated that the
Great Red Spot was about forty thousand kilometers in length,
so much bigger and much more elongated than it is today.
That goes with what we were saying last time about
the Great Red Spot shrinking and becoming rounder over time.
(05:51):
In these observations more than one hundred years ago, it
was gigantic and it was way more flattened out.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, definitely look up this eighteen seven photograph if you
have the ability to do so. Let's see. We also
discussed the nature of the storm itself, somewhat an enormous
anti cyclone that dwarfs not only any storm we've ever
known on Earth, but the Earth itself. And in this
episode we're back to discuss more facts, observations, and hypotheses
(06:18):
concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet it calls home.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
So Rob, one of the questions we raised last time
that we didn't really get into was the question of
why the Great Red Spot is red and not some
other color. Of course, though we did briefly allude to
the fact that it's sort of a mix of different areas. Right,
there's an outer ring that's sort of like clear or
(06:42):
white that is sometimes known as the hollow, and then
inside that you've got the redder or more orange oval.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yeah, that's right. We talked about its greatness, but not
its redness so much. I want to discredit a couple
of hypotheses real quick. First of all, the great red
spot is not the jelly insertion point on a planet
that is, in essence, one gigantic jelly filled donut. I
think this would be a reasonable guest to make, but
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Even when you're talking about a real life donut. You
just don't like thinking about the jelly insertion point. Don't
you just want to imagine it somehow in there without
a needle.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try
and hide it. I guess it's how you know what's inside.
And maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
You get a little peak with the dribble.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah. It's also not, as my child suggested this morning,
the vast swirlings of trillions upon trillions of tabby cats.
This was their Joe guests. Their serious guests, by the way,
was that it was red tinted chemicals in the Jovian atmosphere,
which we'll get back to it. That's a pretty good guess.
But as we did talk about in the last episode, yeah,
(07:49):
the Great Red Spot is not entirely one color, and
its overall colorization and contrast has shifted quite a bit.
As we mentioned, seventeenth century observation of this or more
likely a previous storm, did not know the spot's color,
as it was not detectable if that color was present.
But by and large, we've seen the following trends in
(08:12):
its overall color, and I got these from a couple
of different sources that we also cited last time. Historical
and contemporary trends in the size, drift, and color of
Jupiter's Great Red Spot by Simon Etol from twenty eighteen
and colors of Jupiter's large anticyclones and the interaction of
a tropical red oval with the Great Red Spot in
two thousand and eight by Sanchez la Vega at all,
(08:35):
and I'll look at some more recent observations as well,
and a couple of other sources. But in nineteen seventy four,
this is when Pioneer one and two went by striking
red colorization twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, there was an intensification,
a deeper orange color, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen further darkening.
And we have to stress that in none of these
(08:57):
cases are we talking about only changes in color, but
also various changes in dimension, intensity, morphology, and brightness. So
a lot of the analysis ends up getting into like, Okay,
we can look at the color and the color intensity,
but then we can attempt to chart out where those
changes match up with other changes and looking to why
(09:20):
those changes would in fact impact the colorization. The paper
by Simon Atall points out some of these following facts
I want to run through. They write that the grs's
color changes from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen may be
explained by changes and stretching of vorticity or divergence acting
to balance the decrease in relative vorticity. Historically, they point out,
(09:44):
intensity of the Great Red Spot's color appeared to be
somewhat correlated with motion. The color was more intense or
it was darkest when it accelerated. Color and drift rate
also historically seemed to correlate.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Oh, that's interesting, So it seems to be shifting to
the red when the winds are moving faster.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, that's my understanding of it here. But one of
the big things that they drive home is that correlating
the Great Red Spots color changes with an actual physical
mechanism is really challenging, and so a lot of the
work in these papers seems to really really get into
that and come up with various hypotheses as to how
this could be occurring. They point out that drift rate
(10:25):
slash motion doesn't present an obvious physical mechanism other than
possibly via cloud ingestion rate. They say that vortex stretching,
this is the lengthening of vortices and three dimensional fluid
flow is a possible physical mechanism. And they also point
out that the most recent at the time twenty fourteen
through twenty seventeen changes in internal cloud morphology and color
(10:48):
might have been due to changes in divergence, internal vorticity,
and vortex stretching, rather than being correlated to its drift rate. Now,
some of that may just washed past. You do want
to acknowledge, well, first of all, that this is a
very complex topic and I'm just going to attempting to
do my best to relate the basics of it here.
(11:08):
But Also, I have to acknowledge that everything I just
said didn't really answer the question of why is it
red or why is it orange or rust colored? Like?
What is the redness?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Like?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
What are we looking at? And discussion of this topic
is complex, it seems far from settled, but it all
a lot of it anyway, as far as I can understand,
revolves around candidates for the underlying chromophores, So the underlying
particles that produce a given color, sometimes collectively with other
(11:40):
chromophors in general, talking about in general chromophors function and
create colors that we sense. But in the case of
the Great Red Spot, we're also considering all of this
in light of the aforementioned interactions going on in the storm,
including especially how high up into the atmosphere these particles
(12:00):
are pushed. Now, one there's a particular NASA JPL scientists
who is the lead author and sometimes I think maybe
a supporting author on a lot of papers about this,
and it's a man by the name of Robert A. West.
The particular one I was looking at here is Jovian
Clouds and Hayes by West, Bains and Friedson. And in
(12:24):
this paper they present a whole list of both organic
and inorganic chromophore candidates for the Great Red spot that
had been proposed over the years by that point. So
they're compiling them from different different papers, different scientists and
so forth. I'm not going to include them all, but
they include the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on
(12:44):
the inorganic side, and on the organic side, the list
includes the likes of acetylene, photopolymers, proton irradiated H four
plus NH three that's methane plus ammonia, and even by
iota living organisms. And the paper that they're citing for
this idea was a nineteen seventy six paper by Carl
(13:06):
Sagan and Edwin Salpeter who speculated on the possibility of
not only life on Jupiter, but a Jovian ecology.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Okay, so this is in speculation mode, not to say
that we have good reason to think that the red
colors would be caused by living organisms, but like, what
if they were caused that way? We know that say,
blooms of algae in the Earth in the Earth's oceans
can change the color of the oceans. You can have
various reasons that micro organisms change the color of a
(13:36):
landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the
atmosphere of Jupiter.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the oceans because that's
one of the main things that Sagan and Saltpeter are
referencing and sort of using as a model. And it's
a very in depth paper. It's not a general audience
specific paper. But I want to read a quick quote
from it here. Quote we have in this discussion made
no distinction among various locales on Jupiter, but it is
(14:03):
clear that some locales the Great Red Spot, for example,
may be more favor than others because of higher abundances
of organic molecules prevailing updrafts for other reasons. So yeah,
to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely
held candidate for a place in our solar system where
you could find extraterrestrial life. Like it's not like a
(14:24):
best case scenario. But in the paper is quite interesting
and in it they outline how they believe Jupiter's atmosphere
could feature quote ecological niches for sinkers, floaters, and hunters,
and they explore the possibility that such life forms could
exist at different stages of development in all three niches.
(14:45):
So a sinker in this scenario would be a primary
photosynthetic autotroph that reproduces as it passively sinks down through
the atmosphere among its kinds, So comparable to like plankton
in Earth's oceans.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Okay, So getting getting energy from the sun, making its
food that way, and then and then sinking down passively
through the atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Right, And then the floaters would be autotrophic or heterotrophic
organisms that float via some manner of inflated bladder. So
these would be your space jellies and they would eat
the sinkers or and or they would depend on on
solar energy as well. Okay, and then the hunter would
be the next step, a predator jellyfish type creature that
(15:31):
hunts on the floaters, or maybe it's a Manda ray.
You know, you can you can sort of go wild
with the imagination here.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah, yeah, that's the kind of thing you see depicted.
And they point out that if this were the case,
and again this is all speculation, they were just you know,
it's like what if, and how would it work? If
they say that, there would be clear there would be
clear evolutionary lines to connect between these different forms. And
another thing it's interesting is, you know, this is exactly
(16:02):
the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clark employed in that
earlier novella that we cited, though of course, his vision,
being a sci fi tale published in Playboy, obviously lacked
the scientific rigor presented in the sag In Saltpeter paper here.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, though of course Clark was quite concerned in many
ways with plausibility, but he's also just trying to tell
a good story.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right, and not really featuring a lot of equations. Yeah, yeah,
So yeah, no shade at Arthur C. Clark at all here.
So as interesting as all this is the more accepted
theories for red chromophores in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
(16:49):
They're not based on the idea that there's life in there.
We still don't have a firm answer, but I wanted
to discuss at least one of the more recent ideas
that seems to have gotten a lot of at so
there was one from twenty fourteen. This was an idea
presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, and
(17:10):
he proposed that what we're broadly seeing is perhaps a
mixture of ammonia and acetylene gases blasted by solar energy
in the high upper reaches of the Great Red Spot.
So we mentioned in the last episode that the Great
Red Spot is pretty deep, it goes pretty deep down,
but I don't know if we really talked about how
(17:30):
high up it goes. I've read that the Great Red
Spot may extend something like eight kilometers or five miles
above the surrounding cloud tops in Jupiter's atmosphere. So the
idea here is that it's pushing its contents up higher
in the atmosphere than the surrounding areas and in doing
so subjecting them to greater solar interference, greater solar UV light,
(17:54):
and laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible.
So the idea here is that we have these chromophores,
these ammonia and settling gases that are not already red
in color, but they are shot up high enough that
they are exposed to more UV light, more solar radiation,
(18:15):
and that is what generates the color that we see
as the Great Red Spot. Okay, if this hypothesis is correct,
it would mean that the Great Red Spot is not
like red all the way down. It would just be
red more or less at the surface, something that you
see compared in some of the science journalism, especially to
(18:36):
a sunburn.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Yeah, okay, so I saw this. I saw articles describing
the sunburn hypothesis of the redness, though a different mechanism
obviously than like inflamed skin.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
But yeah, but skin deep, I guess is the metaphor
you could use here. Now. To be clear, there are
other competing hypotheses in which it wouldn't be just gray
or white underneath, it would be like red all the
way down. These competing hypotheses still envision some model in
(19:06):
which there are red chromophores that are pushed up through
the storm from greater depths, but they're red in color
within the storm as well as at the upper surface.
So again, yeah, it's a complex topic, getting it like
it's so red. Why is it so red? Well, we
don't know for sure, but we have some very interesting
hypotheses as to why, some definitely more believable and likely
(19:29):
than others. But that means that I do love the
idea that, hey, what if it's red because it's just
full of life? That would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, what if we're looking at algal blooms and certain
bands all in the surface.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, in a way, it's really it's the more exciting. Well,
I mean, I think all these ideas are exciting, but
you can you can imagine where that idea would maybe
be that nice mix of exciting and accessible to the
average person. But yeah, I don't think that's what's going
on there.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
So I wanted to come back to a question we
raised in the last episode. We established last time that
the great red spot of today, at least according to
most informed observers, is probably not the same red spot
seen by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini in the seventeenth century.
You know, we talked about him. He saw a spot
(20:19):
in the sixteen sixties. But it's probably not the same
one for a number of reasons, one of which is
that astronomers stopped seeing the spot for like many decades.
It seems like suddenly, like in the seventeen hundreds, people
are not seeing this thing anymore, And it seems like
astronomers don't know a giant red spot again until about
eighteen thirty one. So that seems quite implausible. If it
(20:42):
was the same spot and it was there the whole time.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, otherwise people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting,
you know.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
So it's very unlikely that it's the same spot astronomers
saw in the seventeenth century. But that suggests that storms
like this come in. And if they come and go,
where do they come from? How did the current spot
arise in the first place. Now, in twenty twenty four,
there was a bunch of reporting about the origin of
(21:11):
the Great Red Spot based on the publication of a
scientific paper that we did mention in part one of
this series, but I'm going to give the full citation here.
The paper is called the Origin of Jupiter's Great Red Spot,
and it was by a group of authors, the first
author of which we actually just mentioned another paper by
them a moment ago, But anyway, it's by Augustine Sanchez
(21:32):
la Vega, Enrique Garcia Melando, John Legereta, Arnew, Miro Menel Soria,
and Kevin Arenz Velasquez. This was published in Geophysical Research
Letters in twenty twenty four, and the authors of this
paper were based, i believe, all in Spain at several
different institutions like the University of the Basque Country and
(21:53):
Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and in addition to this paper,
I relied on some explanation in an alais from several articles,
especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and Science
Communicator fill Plate that was from July twenty twenty four. Now,
before I get into the details about this discovery, I
did want to mention a bit of background about the
(22:16):
structure of Jupiter and its atmosphere because that kind of
informs this research. So a few things about the structure
of Jupiter we didn't quite get into yet. Jupiter is
made mostly of the same thing the Sun is made of,
actually of hydrogen and helium, and so if you're going
from the outside in, Jupiter has a vast layer of
(22:36):
atmospheric gas, again dominated by hydrogen and helium, along with
small amounts of other stuff like water, methane and ammonia,
and some hydrocarbons like benzene, and then beneath that you
keep going down and the pressure eventually becomes so great
that the hydrogen takes a liquid form, and you will
have a planet wide ocean of liquid hydrogen. So that
(23:00):
the runaway winner for the largest ocean in the Solar System,
though one thing that's worth noting is that the boundaries
between these layers are not sharp. Instead, they gradually bleed
into one another. So falling through the atmosphere of Jupiter
into its global ocean would not be like falling through
the atmosphere of Earth and then suddenly hitting the surface
of the water where you hit with a smack. Instead,
(23:22):
you would be continually sinking through a thick hot hydrogen
helium stew of increasing density and heat as you go down,
which eventually becomes fully liquid. And then, of course, if
you keep going down from their conditions change further further
into the liquid hydrogen ocean, you reach a layer of
what scientists call liquid metallic hydrogen. At this point, the
(23:47):
pressure is so extreme that electrons pop off of the
hydrogen atoms. So normally a hydrogen atom is one proton
and one electron. Here, the electrons get squeezed off of
these atomic nuclei and they can flow unrestrained through the fluid,
making it extremely electrically conductive like a metal, which actually
(24:09):
creates the dynamo effect that scientists think is responsible for
generating Jupiter's magnetic field. So this metallic hydrogen layer is
also known as the inner mantle, and it takes up
most of the planet's radius. If you measure the diameter
of Jupiter, most of it is this metallic hydrogen layer,
(24:30):
and then even deeper than that, the mantle is thought
to graduate into a loose core made of denser materials,
maybe some rocky icy solids leftover from the planet's early formation.
But there's still a bunch of unanswered questions about exactly
what the core is made of and how it is structured.
This was one of the issues that NASA's Junomission was investigating.
(24:52):
But anyway, when you look at the composition of the
planet like this, it makes me think about how in
the previous episode, probably a bunch at times I was
saying stuff about the surface features of Jupiter. I was
talking about the red spot and other things you can
see this way, But of course Jupiter does not actually
(25:12):
have a surface. What we're describing when we talk about
its surface are in reality, patterns of clouds at the
top of Jupiter's atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, it even gets complicated when we start talking
about the surface of Earth, because this we've talked about
in our discussions of the deep ocean. You know, it's
like I mean technically the deep ocean. If if you're
at the bottom of the sea, you're standing on the
rocky surface of the planet. So you know, it's like
our world's kind of weird. And then we we equate
everything to the slim layer of the atmosphere in which
(25:47):
we can live. So, yeah, what do we mean by
surface with a planet anyway?
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Yeah, exactly. I mean often it gets into a question
of definition. It's not as clear as you thought, what
do you mean by surface? And a lot of times
what we mean when we're just talking casually is what's
the part of the planet I can see from space?
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, Like, how would like balloon based floating organisms judge
life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like
bottom dwellers or something.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, another thing that's important to understand
about the structure of Jupiter, if you're going to get
into the origins of the Great Red Spot, is the
planet's zonal striping pattern. Jupiter has these lateral bands going
parallel to its equator. You've got dark stripes, mostly red
and orange in color from our perspective at least, and
(26:38):
white or light colored stripes. These are known as belts
and zones respectively. The dark stripes are the belts and
the light stripes are the zones. Jupiter generates a lot
of internal heat. The majority of the heat in Earth's
atmosphere comes from the Sun comes down from above, but
the majority of heat in Jupiter's atmosphere actually comes from
(27:01):
deep within Jupiter itself. It's getting more heat from inside
than from outside. So the superheated lower strata of Jupiter's
atmosphere and the liquid hydrogen level these fluids create convection
currents as the heat wants to rise, so hot fluid
rises up through low pressure areas of the atmosphere all
(27:25):
the way up to the top, and then it cools, circulates,
and sinks back down again in higher pressure areas. Actually
similar to what happens with air circulation patterns on Earth,
but the gas giants are larger than the inner planets
and they rotate faster. A day on Jupiter is only
nine point nine hours, so this extremely fast rotation causes
(27:51):
a pronounced Coriolis effect, which we talked about last time.
In the context of Earth. Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more
stream than Earth's because Jupiter is larger and spinning faster.
And this pronounced Coriolis effect creates powerful jet streams running
parallel to Jupiter's equator. These jet streams form the boundaries
(28:16):
of Jupiter's belts and zones. So each zone, remember the
light colored areas. Each zone tends to be a basically
low pressured area. There's some variation in pressure at different altitudes,
but basically a zone is a low pressure area where
warm fluid rises up through the atmosphere and it is
(28:37):
bounded on each side by jet streams, with an east
running jet on the side facing the pole and a
west running jet on the side facing the equator. Belts
are the inverse. You've got high pressure areas again, generally
where cool material sinks back down into the atmosphere, where
the side facing the pole is bounded by a west
(28:59):
flowing jet and the side facing the equator as an
eastward jet. Now what determines the color differences in these
different bands, again, we don't know for sure. One big
idea is that the zones are bright because the clouds
up high in altitude. The first thing we see from
the outside contain crystals of ammonia ice, which look white,
(29:22):
and the belts have thinner ice clouds with less ammonia ice,
so instead we see other things. We see a brown, red,
or orange color which could be caused by different chemicals
the chromophores you were talking about it. Maybe it's caused
by sunburn like you mentioned, or maybe by the presence
of hydrocarbons. We don't really know for sure, but it
(29:42):
does seem like the white color of the zones is
probably due to the ammonia ice clouds.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
A little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular
alcoholic beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
The jellyfish frat boys. They like the ami ice, the
ami ice, the amy light. Ooh, but if you're a jellyfish,
you can't open it with your teeth or your belt buckle,
no hard parts anywhere. How do you get it open?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
There's going to have to be a whole nother paper
just on this topic.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
But anyway, coming back to the Great red spot itself, now,
we've already talked again about the idea that the current
great red spot that we see today has definitely existed
for more than one hundred and ninety years. It was
seen and described in eighteen thirty one. We have strong
reason for believing it was not the same spot Cassini
(30:44):
saw in the sixteen sixties, so how did it form?
The study I mentioned by Sanchez la Vega at all
used a combination of historical observations beginning in the sixteen hundreds,
so like drawings made by astronomers throughout the years and
descriptions that they left, as well as modern numerical modeling
(31:07):
of the storm to answer the question of how it
formed and to answer the question of whether it was
the same spot. But we've already answered that one. No,
it's almost certainly not the same spot. But coming to
the question of how it formed, they tested three potential
explanations to see which one would lead to the formation
of a giant anti cyclone storm like the Great Red
(31:30):
Spot in their simulation. So we'll look at these three
different hypotheses they explored one at a time. One of
them is that it was created by the merging of
two or more smaller storms or smaller vortices. This can
and does happen frequently on Jupiter, or at least they
(31:51):
can merge together. But when the authors ran the simulation here,
they found that merging these smaller vortices did not produce
a storm matching the Great Red Spot. Essentially, even if
you kept adding more and more smaller input storms, I
think they said like four or five of them, you
still did not get a system as big as the
early observations of the GRS. Also, this doesn't match because
(32:15):
the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by
astronomers before eighteen thirty one, and the authors think they
would have been easy enough to see that somebody probably
would have noted them, So the merging of smaller vortices
that probably did not create it. Another idea is what
about a superstorm or megastorm. This would be caused by
(32:38):
an eruption of warmer material warmer matter from lower down
in in Jupiter in Jupiter's atmosphere and that welling up
into the upper atmosphere and causing a storm. We do
see things happen like this on other gas giants, like
on Saturn. Saturn apparently has recurring megastorms that appear roughly
(33:01):
once between every twenty and thirty years, typically when it
is summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The cause of these
storms is not fully understood, but if you want to
see examples of this, you can look up images that
the Cassini probe took in December twenty ten, or actually
the images might have been from later, maybe from twenty eleven,
but it was of a storm that emerged in the
(33:24):
northern hemisphere of Saturn in December twenty ten. You might
have seen this before. It almost looks kind of like
a big, I don't know, milky white cloud sort of
billowing through like along a latitudinal line along the northern
half of Saturn. I don't know how else to describe it,
as like, you know, somebody took a kind of milk
(33:46):
straw and moved it through through the yellow.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I have to say that the images of the superstorm
on Saturn, it looks very chill. It's very on brand
for Saturn. I guess, well, everything with Saturn always feels
kind of serene, and everything with Jupid feels like intimidating
in a bit chaotic somehow.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I couldn't agree more. Yeah, almost Saturnine in character. There
you go, So the author is considered it plausible. This
could be an explanation of what's happening on Jupiter as well. Yeah,
like maybe some kind of warmer material is there's a
convective current that's bringing up this warmer material from below,
and it's creating a storm. They did find that an
(34:25):
upwelling like this could create a large anti cyclonic storm,
but again it was not big enough to explain the
early observations of the Great Red Spot. It didn't create
a system the size and shape of those early sightings. Also,
Jupiter has not been observed to form superstorms of this
(34:46):
kind at the near equatorial latitude of the Great Red Spot.
But then you get to the final idea they tested
for where this could have come from, and this is
what is known as the South Tropical disturbance. Bringing us
back to Arthur C. Clark, this would be a kind
of unstable wind situation. So this happens when the boundary
(35:09):
between two of Jupiter's adjacent bands becomes unstable, and essentially
a jet of wind from one band pushes up into
the normal latitudes of another band. This of course disrupts
the flow of the target band and it creates a vortex,
a swirling wind pattern instead of the straight flowing wind pattern,
(35:32):
And in this case, the resulting vortex can become huge.
And the simulation of this hypothesis found that yes, indeed,
it could produce a vortex matching the size and the
original shape of the Great Red Spot as seen in
the nineteenth century. They also found that this wind mechanism
could explain the changes in size and shape of the
(35:55):
GRS over time, and so the authors conclude this is
most likely how the Great Red Spot formed. It was
from this unstable wind wind condition, the south tropical disturbance,
the wind flowing from one band into the other and
then creating this giant vortex that was self sustaining and
has been self sustaining now for more than one hundred
(36:16):
and ninety years I think one hundred and ninety four
years today, is that right, something like that anyway, But
this brings us back to the question that we've already
addressed before. Can we use this information to judge how
long it will last? Probably not really. It has been
shrinking for years, especially in the last decade and a half,
(36:38):
it seems to have been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear
in the near future, but as we've said several times now,
we just don't have enough information or understanding to make
a firm prediction. Maybe it will last a long time,
yet we don't really know.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
The big question Joe is will it still be there
in the year twenty four to one, because in the
series for Now you have Star Trek Picard that is
when we see a massive borg cube ship hide in
and then emerge from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a
good place to hide as well? It's the last place
you'd think, right, Oh wait, do they not have cloaking?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Do I do?
Speaker 3 (37:19):
I forget how cloaking works.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Uh, you know, there is cloaking, but I don't remember
if the Boorgs have cloaking or maybe you know, you
could see through the cloaking. You know, maybe they're just
being dramatic. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
Maybe they got to power up, they got to get
some of that red red stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You know, this is there. This is still part of
that era where they're ruled by a queen as opposed
to just being a complete like cyborg communist collective. So yeah, uh,
you know it's possible that they could make choices purely
for dramatic purposes.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Okay, so red the Red Spot, it's it's part of
the queen's pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Uh well, actually I do have a good answer to
that question, believe it or not. So we don't know
if the spot will still be there. It seems to
be shrinking it. Maybe it'd be gone by then, but
since previous giant spots have disappeared and new ones have appeared,
if we lose the current Great Red Spot, it may
well be replaced by another spot, maybe much like the original,
(38:16):
or like the one we have.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Now, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Great red spots come, great red spots go. But I
don't know if they're ever a good place to park
a spaceship.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Well, this is a fun couple of episodes put together here,
and I'd love to hear from everyone out there in
general about the science we've been discussing here, but also
about just the sci fi flavor. Places where Jupiter's Great
Red Spot has popped up, certainly as a backdrop, but
I'm also interested in times where it may be a
setting or a location in addition to the two examples
(38:49):
we've brought up here. Just a reminder for everyone that's
stuff to blow your mind. Is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesday and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us
online while we're on Instagram, we are stv im podcast
(39:11):
over there. We're on a few other social media accounts
as well. We are Weird House on letterbox and uh
oh yeah, we have a discord and if you'd like
to join that discord server, well, you can just email
us at the email address we're going to share in
just a minute here.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This
is Robert Lamb. It's Saturday, of course, so we have
another vault episode for you. This is going to be
The Great Eye of Jupiter, Part two of two. It
originally published five thirteen, twenty twenty five. Let's jump in.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We are back with our second episode on the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter, and in the last episode we'll
get to sort of a rundown of what we talked
about last time. But one of the things we did
mention a few different times is how Jupiter does show
up in science fiction, oftentimes just as a backdrop, sometimes
in a more plot or fashion. But I was looking
(01:02):
around because I'm like, Okay, if I dive deeper into
written fiction, I'm sure there's some great hardcore Jupiter sci
fi that references the Spot. And sure enough, there's a
novella from Let's See nineteen seventy one. I believe the
original version of it was published in Playboy magazine, and
(01:23):
it's set in the year twenty fifty. It is titled
a Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Oh yeah, huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This
is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
It is? Yeah, this is a pretty famous one. I've
never read it, which is why it didn't, you know,
come to my mind immediately. And we may have referenced
it on the show in the past, but it was
a big one, was a Nebula Award winner, highly influential tale.
I wish I'd had a chance to read it in
full ahead of our recording, but I did go through
it and look for references to the Great Red Spot,
(01:57):
and there are actually a couple of them. Is kind
of bookended because I believe on the way in our
main character is sort of pining for a visit to
the Great Red Spot, and then later when he leaves, he's,
you know, he feels kind of bittersweet about it, and things, well,
maybe I'll see it next time.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism
of the story, but this did cause me to think,
would the Great Red Spot feel like the Great Red
Spot if you were in it instead of looking at
it from above, you know. Yeah, it's like imagining wanting
to go to an island, because the island is shaped
like something when seen from orbit, but like when you're
(02:34):
on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd
just be on land.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, it's like I love the shape of Australia. I
really want to visit it somedays so I can appreciate
its shape.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
But then again, I'm sure the Great Red Spot, like
you know, like many things on Jupiter would be, would
have fascinating local characteristics as well. It just wouldn't be
a Great Red Spot anymore. It would be whatever. I
don't know, wind's whipping around you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So this story can be obtained, I'd believe in it,
least in one major Arthur C. Clark collection, and certainly
go out and read it and fall right into us
if you have read in full, if you have thoughts
on it. But I want to read one quick passage
from it that references the Great Red Spot. Quote. The
Great Red Spot itself, the most spectacular of all the
planet's features, lay thousands of miles to the south. It
(03:20):
had been a temptation to descend there, but the South
Tropical Disturbance was unusually active, with currents reaching over nine
hundred miles an hour. It would have been asking for
trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The
Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait
for future expeditions.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Wow, what a coincidence. I'm actually going to end up
in this episode talking about the South Tropical Disturbance. That's
not a thing made up for the Arthur C. Clark story.
That's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah. And it's also I mean, like how he's acknowledging
the mysteries of the Great Red Spot, because as we've
been discussing, there are plenty of mysteries that still remain about.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It, absolutely aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays
dwelling there.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah. So we're back to continue our discussion of the
Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a massive storm visible from
Earth by telescope. In the last episode, we discussed the
history of the spots observation in the telescopic age, beginning
in the seventeenth century and then with greatly improved imaging
capabilities in the twentieth century and beyond. We discussed how
(04:26):
the Great Red storm we know today might not be
the storm that Giovanni Cassini noted in sixteen sixty five,
and how the storm is long lasting compared to terrestrial storms,
but still a temporary atmospheric feature in the life cycle
of a planet, so it won't be there forever, but
we don't know when it will go away.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So regarding the observations in the eighteen hundreds, I don't
recall if this came up in the last episode. You
can remind me if I've forgotten this, Rob, But I
actually found out that there was a photo, a telescopic
photo of the Great Red Spot taken of Jupiter in
the nineteenth century. It was taken by Irish astronomer Agnes
(05:04):
Mary Clerk in eighteen seventy nine, and Rob I attached
a copy of this black and white photo for you
to look at in the outline. Here. You don't get
a lot of definition on the various bands going back
and forth like you see in the good color photos
of Jupiter today. Mainly it looks like one sort of
light gray ball with a big dark stripe in the
middle and then just a huge, gigantic elongated oval on
(05:30):
one side of the equatorial stripe, and apparently at the
time this photo was taken, it was estimated that the
Great Red Spot was about forty thousand kilometers in length,
so much bigger and much more elongated than it is today.
That goes with what we were saying last time about
the Great Red Spot shrinking and becoming rounder over time.
(05:51):
In these observations more than one hundred years ago, it
was gigantic and it was way more flattened out.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, definitely look up this eighteen seven photograph if you
have the ability to do so. Let's see. We also
discussed the nature of the storm itself, somewhat an enormous
anti cyclone that dwarfs not only any storm we've ever
known on Earth, but the Earth itself. And in this
episode we're back to discuss more facts, observations, and hypotheses
(06:18):
concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet it calls home.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
So Rob, one of the questions we raised last time
that we didn't really get into was the question of
why the Great Red Spot is red and not some
other color. Of course, though we did briefly allude to
the fact that it's sort of a mix of different areas. Right,
there's an outer ring that's sort of like clear or
(06:42):
white that is sometimes known as the hollow, and then
inside that you've got the redder or more orange oval.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yeah, that's right. We talked about its greatness, but not
its redness so much. I want to discredit a couple
of hypotheses real quick. First of all, the great red
spot is not the jelly insertion point on a planet
that is, in essence, one gigantic jelly filled donut. I
think this would be a reasonable guest to make, but
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Even when you're talking about a real life donut. You
just don't like thinking about the jelly insertion point. Don't
you just want to imagine it somehow in there without
a needle.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try
and hide it. I guess it's how you know what's inside.
And maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
You get a little peak with the dribble.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah. It's also not, as my child suggested this morning,
the vast swirlings of trillions upon trillions of tabby cats.
This was their Joe guests. Their serious guests, by the way,
was that it was red tinted chemicals in the Jovian atmosphere,
which we'll get back to it. That's a pretty good guess.
But as we did talk about in the last episode, yeah,
(07:49):
the Great Red Spot is not entirely one color, and
its overall colorization and contrast has shifted quite a bit.
As we mentioned, seventeenth century observation of this or more
likely a previous storm, did not know the spot's color,
as it was not detectable if that color was present.
But by and large, we've seen the following trends in
(08:12):
its overall color, and I got these from a couple
of different sources that we also cited last time. Historical
and contemporary trends in the size, drift, and color of
Jupiter's Great Red Spot by Simon Etol from twenty eighteen
and colors of Jupiter's large anticyclones and the interaction of
a tropical red oval with the Great Red Spot in
two thousand and eight by Sanchez la Vega at all,
(08:35):
and I'll look at some more recent observations as well,
and a couple of other sources. But in nineteen seventy four,
this is when Pioneer one and two went by striking
red colorization twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, there was an intensification,
a deeper orange color, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen further darkening.
And we have to stress that in none of these
(08:57):
cases are we talking about only changes in color, but
also various changes in dimension, intensity, morphology, and brightness. So
a lot of the analysis ends up getting into like, Okay,
we can look at the color and the color intensity,
but then we can attempt to chart out where those
changes match up with other changes and looking to why
(09:20):
those changes would in fact impact the colorization. The paper
by Simon Atall points out some of these following facts
I want to run through. They write that the grs's
color changes from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen may be
explained by changes and stretching of vorticity or divergence acting
to balance the decrease in relative vorticity. Historically, they point out,
(09:44):
intensity of the Great Red Spot's color appeared to be
somewhat correlated with motion. The color was more intense or
it was darkest when it accelerated. Color and drift rate
also historically seemed to correlate.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
Oh, that's interesting, So it seems to be shifting to
the red when the winds are moving faster.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, that's my understanding of it here. But one of
the big things that they drive home is that correlating
the Great Red Spots color changes with an actual physical
mechanism is really challenging, and so a lot of the
work in these papers seems to really really get into
that and come up with various hypotheses as to how
this could be occurring. They point out that drift rate
(10:25):
slash motion doesn't present an obvious physical mechanism other than
possibly via cloud ingestion rate. They say that vortex stretching,
this is the lengthening of vortices and three dimensional fluid
flow is a possible physical mechanism. And they also point
out that the most recent at the time twenty fourteen
through twenty seventeen changes in internal cloud morphology and color
(10:48):
might have been due to changes in divergence, internal vorticity,
and vortex stretching, rather than being correlated to its drift rate. Now,
some of that may just washed past. You do want
to acknowledge, well, first of all, that this is a
very complex topic and I'm just going to attempting to
do my best to relate the basics of it here.
(11:08):
But Also, I have to acknowledge that everything I just
said didn't really answer the question of why is it
red or why is it orange or rust colored? Like?
What is the redness?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Like?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
What are we looking at? And discussion of this topic
is complex, it seems far from settled, but it all
a lot of it anyway, as far as I can understand,
revolves around candidates for the underlying chromophores, So the underlying
particles that produce a given color, sometimes collectively with other
(11:40):
chromophors in general, talking about in general chromophors function and
create colors that we sense. But in the case of
the Great Red Spot, we're also considering all of this
in light of the aforementioned interactions going on in the storm,
including especially how high up into the atmosphere these particles
(12:00):
are pushed. Now, one there's a particular NASA JPL scientists
who is the lead author and sometimes I think maybe
a supporting author on a lot of papers about this,
and it's a man by the name of Robert A. West.
The particular one I was looking at here is Jovian
Clouds and Hayes by West, Bains and Friedson. And in
(12:24):
this paper they present a whole list of both organic
and inorganic chromophore candidates for the Great Red spot that
had been proposed over the years by that point. So
they're compiling them from different different papers, different scientists and
so forth. I'm not going to include them all, but
they include the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on
(12:44):
the inorganic side, and on the organic side, the list
includes the likes of acetylene, photopolymers, proton irradiated H four
plus NH three that's methane plus ammonia, and even by
iota living organisms. And the paper that they're citing for
this idea was a nineteen seventy six paper by Carl
(13:06):
Sagan and Edwin Salpeter who speculated on the possibility of
not only life on Jupiter, but a Jovian ecology.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Okay, so this is in speculation mode, not to say
that we have good reason to think that the red
colors would be caused by living organisms, but like, what
if they were caused that way? We know that say,
blooms of algae in the Earth in the Earth's oceans
can change the color of the oceans. You can have
various reasons that micro organisms change the color of a
(13:36):
landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the
atmosphere of Jupiter.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the oceans because that's
one of the main things that Sagan and Saltpeter are
referencing and sort of using as a model. And it's
a very in depth paper. It's not a general audience
specific paper. But I want to read a quick quote
from it here. Quote we have in this discussion made
no distinction among various locales on Jupiter, but it is
(14:03):
clear that some locales the Great Red Spot, for example,
may be more favor than others because of higher abundances
of organic molecules prevailing updrafts for other reasons. So yeah,
to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely
held candidate for a place in our solar system where
you could find extraterrestrial life. Like it's not like a
(14:24):
best case scenario. But in the paper is quite interesting
and in it they outline how they believe Jupiter's atmosphere
could feature quote ecological niches for sinkers, floaters, and hunters,
and they explore the possibility that such life forms could
exist at different stages of development in all three niches.
(14:45):
So a sinker in this scenario would be a primary
photosynthetic autotroph that reproduces as it passively sinks down through
the atmosphere among its kinds, So comparable to like plankton
in Earth's oceans.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Okay, So getting getting energy from the sun, making its
food that way, and then and then sinking down passively
through the atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Right, And then the floaters would be autotrophic or heterotrophic
organisms that float via some manner of inflated bladder. So
these would be your space jellies and they would eat
the sinkers or and or they would depend on on
solar energy as well. Okay, and then the hunter would
be the next step, a predator jellyfish type creature that
(15:31):
hunts on the floaters, or maybe it's a Manda ray.
You know, you can you can sort of go wild
with the imagination here.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah, yeah, that's the kind of thing you see depicted.
And they point out that if this were the case,
and again this is all speculation, they were just you know,
it's like what if, and how would it work? If
they say that, there would be clear there would be
clear evolutionary lines to connect between these different forms. And
another thing it's interesting is, you know, this is exactly
(16:02):
the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clark employed in that
earlier novella that we cited, though of course, his vision,
being a sci fi tale published in Playboy, obviously lacked
the scientific rigor presented in the sag In Saltpeter paper here.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, though of course Clark was quite concerned in many
ways with plausibility, but he's also just trying to tell
a good story.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right, and not really featuring a lot of equations. Yeah, yeah,
So yeah, no shade at Arthur C. Clark at all here.
So as interesting as all this is the more accepted
theories for red chromophores in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
(16:49):
They're not based on the idea that there's life in there.
We still don't have a firm answer, but I wanted
to discuss at least one of the more recent ideas
that seems to have gotten a lot of at so
there was one from twenty fourteen. This was an idea
presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, and
(17:10):
he proposed that what we're broadly seeing is perhaps a
mixture of ammonia and acetylene gases blasted by solar energy
in the high upper reaches of the Great Red Spot.
So we mentioned in the last episode that the Great
Red Spot is pretty deep, it goes pretty deep down,
but I don't know if we really talked about how
(17:30):
high up it goes. I've read that the Great Red
Spot may extend something like eight kilometers or five miles
above the surrounding cloud tops in Jupiter's atmosphere. So the
idea here is that it's pushing its contents up higher
in the atmosphere than the surrounding areas and in doing
so subjecting them to greater solar interference, greater solar UV light,
(17:54):
and laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible.
So the idea here is that we have these chromophores,
these ammonia and settling gases that are not already red
in color, but they are shot up high enough that
they are exposed to more UV light, more solar radiation,
(18:15):
and that is what generates the color that we see
as the Great Red Spot. Okay, if this hypothesis is correct,
it would mean that the Great Red Spot is not
like red all the way down. It would just be
red more or less at the surface, something that you
see compared in some of the science journalism, especially to
(18:36):
a sunburn.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Yeah, okay, so I saw this. I saw articles describing
the sunburn hypothesis of the redness, though a different mechanism
obviously than like inflamed skin.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
But yeah, but skin deep, I guess is the metaphor
you could use here. Now. To be clear, there are
other competing hypotheses in which it wouldn't be just gray
or white underneath, it would be like red all the
way down. These competing hypotheses still envision some model in
(19:06):
which there are red chromophores that are pushed up through
the storm from greater depths, but they're red in color
within the storm as well as at the upper surface.
So again, yeah, it's a complex topic, getting it like
it's so red. Why is it so red? Well, we
don't know for sure, but we have some very interesting
hypotheses as to why, some definitely more believable and likely
(19:29):
than others. But that means that I do love the
idea that, hey, what if it's red because it's just
full of life? That would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, what if we're looking at algal blooms and certain
bands all in the surface.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, in a way, it's really it's the more exciting. Well,
I mean, I think all these ideas are exciting, but
you can you can imagine where that idea would maybe
be that nice mix of exciting and accessible to the
average person. But yeah, I don't think that's what's going
on there.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
So I wanted to come back to a question we
raised in the last episode. We established last time that
the great red spot of today, at least according to
most informed observers, is probably not the same red spot
seen by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini in the seventeenth century.
You know, we talked about him. He saw a spot
(20:19):
in the sixteen sixties. But it's probably not the same
one for a number of reasons, one of which is
that astronomers stopped seeing the spot for like many decades.
It seems like suddenly, like in the seventeen hundreds, people
are not seeing this thing anymore, And it seems like
astronomers don't know a giant red spot again until about
eighteen thirty one. So that seems quite implausible. If it
(20:42):
was the same spot and it was there the whole time.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, otherwise people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting,
you know.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
So it's very unlikely that it's the same spot astronomers
saw in the seventeenth century. But that suggests that storms
like this come in. And if they come and go,
where do they come from? How did the current spot
arise in the first place. Now, in twenty twenty four,
there was a bunch of reporting about the origin of
(21:11):
the Great Red Spot based on the publication of a
scientific paper that we did mention in part one of
this series, but I'm going to give the full citation here.
The paper is called the Origin of Jupiter's Great Red Spot,
and it was by a group of authors, the first
author of which we actually just mentioned another paper by
them a moment ago, But anyway, it's by Augustine Sanchez
(21:32):
la Vega, Enrique Garcia Melando, John Legereta, Arnew, Miro Menel Soria,
and Kevin Arenz Velasquez. This was published in Geophysical Research
Letters in twenty twenty four, and the authors of this
paper were based, i believe, all in Spain at several
different institutions like the University of the Basque Country and
(21:53):
Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and in addition to this paper,
I relied on some explanation in an alais from several articles,
especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and Science
Communicator fill Plate that was from July twenty twenty four. Now,
before I get into the details about this discovery, I
did want to mention a bit of background about the
(22:16):
structure of Jupiter and its atmosphere because that kind of
informs this research. So a few things about the structure
of Jupiter we didn't quite get into yet. Jupiter is
made mostly of the same thing the Sun is made of,
actually of hydrogen and helium, and so if you're going
from the outside in, Jupiter has a vast layer of
(22:36):
atmospheric gas, again dominated by hydrogen and helium, along with
small amounts of other stuff like water, methane and ammonia,
and some hydrocarbons like benzene, and then beneath that you
keep going down and the pressure eventually becomes so great
that the hydrogen takes a liquid form, and you will
have a planet wide ocean of liquid hydrogen. So that
(23:00):
the runaway winner for the largest ocean in the Solar System,
though one thing that's worth noting is that the boundaries
between these layers are not sharp. Instead, they gradually bleed
into one another. So falling through the atmosphere of Jupiter
into its global ocean would not be like falling through
the atmosphere of Earth and then suddenly hitting the surface
of the water where you hit with a smack. Instead,
(23:22):
you would be continually sinking through a thick hot hydrogen
helium stew of increasing density and heat as you go down,
which eventually becomes fully liquid. And then, of course, if
you keep going down from their conditions change further further
into the liquid hydrogen ocean, you reach a layer of
what scientists call liquid metallic hydrogen. At this point, the
(23:47):
pressure is so extreme that electrons pop off of the
hydrogen atoms. So normally a hydrogen atom is one proton
and one electron. Here, the electrons get squeezed off of
these atomic nuclei and they can flow unrestrained through the fluid,
making it extremely electrically conductive like a metal, which actually
(24:09):
creates the dynamo effect that scientists think is responsible for
generating Jupiter's magnetic field. So this metallic hydrogen layer is
also known as the inner mantle, and it takes up
most of the planet's radius. If you measure the diameter
of Jupiter, most of it is this metallic hydrogen layer,
(24:30):
and then even deeper than that, the mantle is thought
to graduate into a loose core made of denser materials,
maybe some rocky icy solids leftover from the planet's early formation.
But there's still a bunch of unanswered questions about exactly
what the core is made of and how it is structured.
This was one of the issues that NASA's Junomission was investigating.
(24:52):
But anyway, when you look at the composition of the
planet like this, it makes me think about how in
the previous episode, probably a bunch at times I was
saying stuff about the surface features of Jupiter. I was
talking about the red spot and other things you can
see this way, But of course Jupiter does not actually
(25:12):
have a surface. What we're describing when we talk about
its surface are in reality, patterns of clouds at the
top of Jupiter's atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, it even gets complicated when we start talking
about the surface of Earth, because this we've talked about
in our discussions of the deep ocean. You know, it's
like I mean technically the deep ocean. If if you're
at the bottom of the sea, you're standing on the
rocky surface of the planet. So you know, it's like
our world's kind of weird. And then we we equate
everything to the slim layer of the atmosphere in which
(25:47):
we can live. So, yeah, what do we mean by
surface with a planet anyway?
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Yeah, exactly. I mean often it gets into a question
of definition. It's not as clear as you thought, what
do you mean by surface? And a lot of times
what we mean when we're just talking casually is what's
the part of the planet I can see from space?
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, Like, how would like balloon based floating organisms judge
life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like
bottom dwellers or something.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, another thing that's important to understand
about the structure of Jupiter, if you're going to get
into the origins of the Great Red Spot, is the
planet's zonal striping pattern. Jupiter has these lateral bands going
parallel to its equator. You've got dark stripes, mostly red
and orange in color from our perspective at least, and
(26:38):
white or light colored stripes. These are known as belts
and zones respectively. The dark stripes are the belts and
the light stripes are the zones. Jupiter generates a lot
of internal heat. The majority of the heat in Earth's
atmosphere comes from the Sun comes down from above, but
the majority of heat in Jupiter's atmosphere actually comes from
(27:01):
deep within Jupiter itself. It's getting more heat from inside
than from outside. So the superheated lower strata of Jupiter's
atmosphere and the liquid hydrogen level these fluids create convection
currents as the heat wants to rise, so hot fluid
rises up through low pressure areas of the atmosphere all
(27:25):
the way up to the top, and then it cools, circulates,
and sinks back down again in higher pressure areas. Actually
similar to what happens with air circulation patterns on Earth,
but the gas giants are larger than the inner planets
and they rotate faster. A day on Jupiter is only
nine point nine hours, so this extremely fast rotation causes
(27:51):
a pronounced Coriolis effect, which we talked about last time.
In the context of Earth. Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more
stream than Earth's because Jupiter is larger and spinning faster.
And this pronounced Coriolis effect creates powerful jet streams running
parallel to Jupiter's equator. These jet streams form the boundaries
(28:16):
of Jupiter's belts and zones. So each zone, remember the
light colored areas. Each zone tends to be a basically
low pressured area. There's some variation in pressure at different altitudes,
but basically a zone is a low pressure area where
warm fluid rises up through the atmosphere and it is
(28:37):
bounded on each side by jet streams, with an east
running jet on the side facing the pole and a
west running jet on the side facing the equator. Belts
are the inverse. You've got high pressure areas again, generally
where cool material sinks back down into the atmosphere, where
the side facing the pole is bounded by a west
(28:59):
flowing jet and the side facing the equator as an
eastward jet. Now what determines the color differences in these
different bands, again, we don't know for sure. One big
idea is that the zones are bright because the clouds
up high in altitude. The first thing we see from
the outside contain crystals of ammonia ice, which look white,
(29:22):
and the belts have thinner ice clouds with less ammonia ice,
so instead we see other things. We see a brown, red,
or orange color which could be caused by different chemicals
the chromophores you were talking about it. Maybe it's caused
by sunburn like you mentioned, or maybe by the presence
of hydrocarbons. We don't really know for sure, but it
(29:42):
does seem like the white color of the zones is
probably due to the ammonia ice clouds.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
A little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular
alcoholic beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
The jellyfish frat boys. They like the ami ice, the
ami ice, the amy light. Ooh, but if you're a jellyfish,
you can't open it with your teeth or your belt buckle,
no hard parts anywhere. How do you get it open?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
There's going to have to be a whole nother paper
just on this topic.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
But anyway, coming back to the Great red spot itself, now,
we've already talked again about the idea that the current
great red spot that we see today has definitely existed
for more than one hundred and ninety years. It was
seen and described in eighteen thirty one. We have strong
reason for believing it was not the same spot Cassini
(30:44):
saw in the sixteen sixties, so how did it form?
The study I mentioned by Sanchez la Vega at all
used a combination of historical observations beginning in the sixteen hundreds,
so like drawings made by astronomers throughout the years and
descriptions that they left, as well as modern numerical modeling
(31:07):
of the storm to answer the question of how it
formed and to answer the question of whether it was
the same spot. But we've already answered that one. No,
it's almost certainly not the same spot. But coming to
the question of how it formed, they tested three potential
explanations to see which one would lead to the formation
of a giant anti cyclone storm like the Great Red
(31:30):
Spot in their simulation. So we'll look at these three
different hypotheses they explored one at a time. One of
them is that it was created by the merging of
two or more smaller storms or smaller vortices. This can
and does happen frequently on Jupiter, or at least they
(31:51):
can merge together. But when the authors ran the simulation here,
they found that merging these smaller vortices did not produce
a storm matching the Great Red Spot. Essentially, even if
you kept adding more and more smaller input storms, I
think they said like four or five of them, you
still did not get a system as big as the
early observations of the GRS. Also, this doesn't match because
(32:15):
the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by
astronomers before eighteen thirty one, and the authors think they
would have been easy enough to see that somebody probably
would have noted them, So the merging of smaller vortices
that probably did not create it. Another idea is what
about a superstorm or megastorm. This would be caused by
(32:38):
an eruption of warmer material warmer matter from lower down
in in Jupiter in Jupiter's atmosphere and that welling up
into the upper atmosphere and causing a storm. We do
see things happen like this on other gas giants, like
on Saturn. Saturn apparently has recurring megastorms that appear roughly
(33:01):
once between every twenty and thirty years, typically when it
is summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The cause of these
storms is not fully understood, but if you want to
see examples of this, you can look up images that
the Cassini probe took in December twenty ten, or actually
the images might have been from later, maybe from twenty eleven,
but it was of a storm that emerged in the
(33:24):
northern hemisphere of Saturn in December twenty ten. You might
have seen this before. It almost looks kind of like
a big, I don't know, milky white cloud sort of
billowing through like along a latitudinal line along the northern
half of Saturn. I don't know how else to describe it,
as like, you know, somebody took a kind of milk
(33:46):
straw and moved it through through the yellow.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I have to say that the images of the superstorm
on Saturn, it looks very chill. It's very on brand
for Saturn. I guess, well, everything with Saturn always feels
kind of serene, and everything with Jupid feels like intimidating
in a bit chaotic somehow.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I couldn't agree more. Yeah, almost Saturnine in character. There
you go, So the author is considered it plausible. This
could be an explanation of what's happening on Jupiter as well. Yeah,
like maybe some kind of warmer material is there's a
convective current that's bringing up this warmer material from below,
and it's creating a storm. They did find that an
(34:25):
upwelling like this could create a large anti cyclonic storm,
but again it was not big enough to explain the
early observations of the Great Red Spot. It didn't create
a system the size and shape of those early sightings. Also,
Jupiter has not been observed to form superstorms of this
(34:46):
kind at the near equatorial latitude of the Great Red Spot.
But then you get to the final idea they tested
for where this could have come from, and this is
what is known as the South Tropical disturbance. Bringing us
back to Arthur C. Clark, this would be a kind
of unstable wind situation. So this happens when the boundary
(35:09):
between two of Jupiter's adjacent bands becomes unstable, and essentially
a jet of wind from one band pushes up into
the normal latitudes of another band. This of course disrupts
the flow of the target band and it creates a vortex,
a swirling wind pattern instead of the straight flowing wind pattern,
(35:32):
And in this case, the resulting vortex can become huge.
And the simulation of this hypothesis found that yes, indeed,
it could produce a vortex matching the size and the
original shape of the Great Red Spot as seen in
the nineteenth century. They also found that this wind mechanism
could explain the changes in size and shape of the
(35:55):
GRS over time, and so the authors conclude this is
most likely how the Great Red Spot formed. It was
from this unstable wind wind condition, the south tropical disturbance,
the wind flowing from one band into the other and
then creating this giant vortex that was self sustaining and
has been self sustaining now for more than one hundred
(36:16):
and ninety years I think one hundred and ninety four
years today, is that right, something like that anyway, But
this brings us back to the question that we've already
addressed before. Can we use this information to judge how
long it will last? Probably not really. It has been
shrinking for years, especially in the last decade and a half,
(36:38):
it seems to have been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear
in the near future, but as we've said several times now,
we just don't have enough information or understanding to make
a firm prediction. Maybe it will last a long time,
yet we don't really know.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
The big question Joe is will it still be there
in the year twenty four to one, because in the
series for Now you have Star Trek Picard that is
when we see a massive borg cube ship hide in
and then emerge from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a
good place to hide as well? It's the last place
you'd think, right, Oh wait, do they not have cloaking?
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Do I do?
Speaker 3 (37:19):
I forget how cloaking works.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Uh, you know, there is cloaking, but I don't remember
if the Boorgs have cloaking or maybe you know, you
could see through the cloaking. You know, maybe they're just
being dramatic. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
Maybe they got to power up, they got to get
some of that red red stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You know, this is there. This is still part of
that era where they're ruled by a queen as opposed
to just being a complete like cyborg communist collective. So yeah, uh,
you know it's possible that they could make choices purely
for dramatic purposes.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Okay, so red the Red Spot, it's it's part of
the queen's pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Uh well, actually I do have a good answer to
that question, believe it or not. So we don't know
if the spot will still be there. It seems to
be shrinking it. Maybe it'd be gone by then, but
since previous giant spots have disappeared and new ones have appeared,
if we lose the current Great Red Spot, it may
well be replaced by another spot, maybe much like the original,
(38:16):
or like the one we have.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Now, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Great red spots come, great red spots go. But I
don't know if they're ever a good place to park
a spaceship.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Well, this is a fun couple of episodes put together here,
and I'd love to hear from everyone out there in
general about the science we've been discussing here, but also
about just the sci fi flavor. Places where Jupiter's Great
Red Spot has popped up, certainly as a backdrop, but
I'm also interested in times where it may be a
setting or a location in addition to the two examples
(38:49):
we've brought up here. Just a reminder for everyone that's
stuff to blow your mind. Is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesday and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us
online while we're on Instagram, we are stv im podcast
(39:11):
over there. We're on a few other social media accounts
as well. We are Weird House on letterbox and uh
oh yeah, we have a discord and if you'd like
to join that discord server, well, you can just email
us at the email address we're going to share in
just a minute here.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb
Joy is essential. And it's also elusive. You can't order it, borrow it, or simply hope it into life. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence: The Joy 101 Podcast with Hoda! Best known for her Emmy-winning work and co-anchoring Today, Hoda Kotb infuses her authenticity, curiosity, and warmth into conversations with the world’s most fascinating people. Entertainment legends, sport icons, wellness experts, and everyday folks will share how they find, allow, and experience joy. Hoda will offer her own tips and takes on seeking a more balanced, harmonious life. If you're craving inspiration, support, and useful tools to maximize your joy, tune in to these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Joy after a breakup, joy as an empty-nester, joy after loss, joy as a caretaker — Hoda's new podcast will speak to you. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb, an iHeartPodcast.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com