May 8, 2025 • 38 mins
In this 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…
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we're going to be talking about the
great Red Spot of Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
That's right. We've you know, we've talked about the Jovian
moons before Jupiter comes up time and time again. We
did an episode talking about, you know, then the mythical
connotations of Jupiter for sure, but you know, we've never
done an episode just on Jupiter, and we're not going
to do that today. We're focusing on a detail of Jupiter.
I think Jupiter is just too big, Like, is it
(00:46):
too big of a topic? Well, probably not. We could
cover it in multiple episodes, but Jupiter is just so
large that it feels intimidating to even attempt to cover
all of it.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Oh, we're doing it piece by piece, defeat in detail.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That's right, like eating an elephant, as they say. Yeah,
Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar system, commanding,
as we've covered before, its own vast system of moons.
Its massiveness is such that a Jupiter mass is actually
used as a unit to describe the massive other massive
cosmic bodies, and given its size and proximity to Earth,
(01:20):
humans have known of the fifth planet since very ancient times,
so long before the invention of the telescope, with observations
made by ancient Babylonians, ancient Chinese, among others. It's bright
and it is observable to the naked eye.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Right, you may in fact associate Jupiter with the dawn
of the age of the telescope, and that could be
because Jupiter is very important, and say the story of
Galileo's early observations. Like Galileo, one of the most important
things he saw early on the telescope was the moons
of Jupiter. He discovered the Galilean moons named after him. Now,
(01:57):
but yeah, we knew about the planet as a point
of life in the sky, one of the movable stars
going back thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's right. So there are a number of what I mean,
Jupiter is an immensely important planet as in addition to
just being immense in all sorts of ways. The main
thing we're going to be talking about here today, though,
is is less essential but more of an interesting detail,
and indeed an iconic detail of its appearance, that being
(02:25):
the great Red Spot, the big red storm that is
visible on the planet Jupiter, and I think, more to
the point, is highly visible in every illustration you've ever
seen of the Solar System, every drawing of the Solar System,
and specifically the planet Jupiter, that you ever had to
do or chose to do as a child and onward.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I would say that the Great Red Spot sort of
gives Jupiter a face that some of the other gas
giants don't have. Though, as we may discuss later on
in this episode or the next, there are similar visible
weather patterns and storms on some of the other gas giants.
There's a big spot on Saturn, there's a spot on Neptune,
(03:10):
as we've talked about before. But I would say none
of those other features are as clear and easy to
see and as just kind of face like as the
red spot on Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, like a great red eye staring at us, judging us,
maybe protecting us a little bit. And you know, of
course it's not really an eye. You know, I'm glad
it's nothing. Oh what if it was just a blemish
on Jupiter's face and we've just been staring at it?
The whole time.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
So rude, my belts are up here.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, so yeah. Even with great vision and optimal eyesight,
humans were unable to glimpse the details of the gas
giants swirling surface until the invention of the telescope in
the early seventeenth century CEE. So, to be clear, humans
have only been capable of observing the Great Red Spot
of Jupiter for roughly three centuries. And the really interesting
(04:04):
thing on top of this is that the planet's key
identifying mark, again that every school child can replicate, is
neither a permanent or even long lasting feature, certainly in
terms of the life of a planet, but rather a
temporary atmospheric occurrence that seemingly comes and goes. We've only
been observing it for a very short amount of time,
(04:25):
you know, it's as a human observed phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, and I guess it can actually be weird in
terms of its existence in time from two different directions.
On one hand, if you think of it as a
feature of the surface of a planet, the fact that
it's a weather pattern makes it actually quite kind of
transient and unstable. You know, it sort of undermines the
ground beneath your feet. To think that the face of
(04:50):
another planet in our Solar system, which we learned when
we were children in school, could be changing within our lifetimes.
Even on the other hand, if you think about it
as a weather pattern, it's kind of freaky how stable
it is for decades or even hundreds of years.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. All right, Well, let's
get into the history of the observation of the Great
Red Spot. So, given that that observation of the Great
Red Spot wasn't possible before the telescope, when do human
observers start noticing it during the telescope era? Based on
what I was reading here, the earliest possible observation, and
(05:30):
I think, ultimately, as we'll discuss, unlikely observation dates back
to May ninth, sixteen sixty four, and that's when seventeenth
century English polymath and author of micrographia Robert Hook observes
something on the face of Jupiter that he described as
a small spot moving east to west. Quote in the
(05:51):
biggest of the three obscure belts of Jupiter. Now we
could easily do a whole episode on Robert Hook. He
had his hands in multiple areas of some aientific inquiry.
He was especially active in the study of the microscopic
world using new microscopic technology. His book Micrographia concerns this work.
In fact, I'm to understand he coined the term cell
(06:12):
in this book, so he was concerned with the little things,
but also the ginormous things such as Jupiter. But based
on a subsequent sixteen sixty six observation and nineteen eighty
seven analysis by Marco for Lani in the Journal of
the British Astronomical Association, I was reading at its thought
(06:33):
that this would have situated the spot in what is
now known as the North Equatorial Belt, the Great Black
Belt according to the American Physical Society, while the Great
Red Spot that we know today is in the South
Equatorial Belt. So, given what we've already explored and what
we'll be getting into, you might well wonder if this
(06:54):
was actually a different storm that Hook was observing. Well, possibly,
But for Lani's argument here was that Hook actually was
looking at the shadow of or the transit, you know,
the silhouette of the second largest Jovian moon, Callisto, or
some other transit shadow. The Royal Society backed Hook's claim, however,
(07:17):
and there are you know, various arguments about you know,
nationalism and so forth that would have been wound up
in that judgment at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, so I've read the same analysis. So the question is,
did he observe the same storm that we see today
as the Great Red Spot? Probably not. Was it maybe
a different storm than we see today possibly, or was
it the shadow cast or the silhouette of one of
the moons, And for Lani says the latter.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yeah, yeah, And that seems to be a fairly convincing
argument here. Now. The other possibility in terms of first
or earliest documented sighting of the red spot takes us
to sixteen sixty five, just a year after Hook's sighting,
and that's when Italian French astronomer Giovanni Cassini noted it
for the first time. In his letters, he described weeding
(08:08):
out different transit shadow spots and noting quote a permanent
one which was often seen to return in the same
place with the same size and shape. So he totaled
thirteen observations. He calculated its rotation. He did not note
the color, perhaps according to the Journal of the British
Astronomical Association, because the instrumentation was too low light to
(08:29):
really pick up on any colorization. Now Again, historians between
these two tend to favor the Cassini observation because it
seems that Cassini is definitely observing. There's a stronger case
to be made that he's observing an actual storm here,
an actual storm spot on Jupiter. But an important distinction
to make here is that this might not have been
(08:50):
the same storm that we see and know today as
being the iconic Great Storm of Jupiter. The article that
I referenced on the Journal of the British Astronomical Association
titled May sixteen sixty four Hook versus Cassini, who discovered
Jupiter's red spot, points out that that first of all,
(09:12):
the history of the red spot or spots is imperfect,
and that no one observed the red spot on Jupiter
after seventeen thirteen until eighteen thirty one, that's when Heinrich
Schwabe observed it and then described in much greater detail
by American astronomer C. W. Pritchett in eighteen seventy eight.
Often often references being the individual to quote unquote rediscover
(09:35):
the great Red Spot, So the permanent spot of Cassini
and the great red spot that astronomers have been observing
since at least eighteen thirty one, they might be two
very different storms. Since around twenty twelve, scientists have observed
a shrinking of the Great Red Spot, and recent flaking
has also led some to think that it might it
might one day disappear. Some have predicted in the past
(09:57):
as little as decades from the point of observation. Others,
and certainly I think more recent observers, have urged more
caution on this. I mean, I say caution, not that
this is really any threat to us whatsoever, but it
They tend to suggest that it may last for some centuries.
(10:17):
Yet I'm not sure if it will last to twenty
four oh one. Hard to say, But this is ultimately
one of those things where no one really knows, because
again it's a storm. Everyone is familiar with the difficulties
we have in predicting how the weather works on our planet.
You know, it's a complex system. Likewise, it's difficult even
(10:39):
with Jupiter to figure out, Well, this storm has lasted
for decades at least, but will it last for decades, more,
centuries more?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
We just don't know, right, So not caution in the
sense of it could harm us, but maybe caution in
the sense of like, don't go to one of the
betting markets and put big money on the storm being
there or disappearing in a certain timeline. There's not a
whole lot we know.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
It would be very interesting to see how the public
responded to it, because I think back to, of course
changes in categorizations or adjustments and categorizations of Pluto as
a planet or some other astral body, and you know,
people ended up having strong opinions about that because the
(11:22):
idea that Pluto's not on the list anymore. It made
them feel threatened at times, are wounded in a way.
And I can imagine a similar reaction to scientists telling everyone,
you know, the red spot in Jupiter is not there anymore,
so don't draw Jupiter the same way, and please everyone
make corrections to your textbooks.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
You know, thinking back on the Pluto thing, some people
I think genuinely do get frustrated when they have to
update what they know about something. But on the other hand,
I think a lot of that was just people trying
to be cute. Yes, just making a little jokey post
on Facebook, like don't take my Pluto away. But somehow
I don't know it like it's something that I think
(12:05):
snowballed from a mostly ironic posting to begin with, into like,
I don't know, somehow an actual kind of sentiment about
like I'm dissatisfied with astronomy today.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah. It kind of at least dips its toes, even
in jest, into sort of science denial, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Yes, though, of course the idea of a planet is
not like a consistent objective category over time. The whole
thing was like, we're updating the definition of what we
consider a planet.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, I mean, we could have gone in the other
direction and just added a list of other things on
the end there. I can't imagine people wanted to memorize
more planets, So you know, I feel like this was
a good balance.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah, yeah,
you'd want to add series to.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
The list you want to. But that's Pluto. Pluto small
and ultimately insignificant compared to the glory of Jupiter. And
and of course it's red Storm, It's great red spot.
There is another, by the way, at least one more.
There is the Little Red Spot, also known as Red
Spot Junior or oval Ba, which formed in nineteen ninety
(13:12):
eight and two thousand from three white oval shaped storms.
So again, like new stuff pops up new details. If
you look at some of the glorious detailed imagery that
we now have of the storms of Jupiter, I mean
it is a complex system. It is like a crazy
swirl of madness there.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Sorry, sorry, I just had to check something off, Mike,
because I had a massive musical confusion in my brain.
When you said Red Spot Junior. I thought I was
hearing that to the tune of the theme song of
a cartoon I watched as a child called James Bond Junior,
Red Spot Junior. But then it turned out I went
and checked and I wasn't even remembering the theme song, right.
(13:53):
I think I was hearing the tune of the Transformers
theme in my head, but putting James Bond Junior.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I don't remember James Bond Jr.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Oh Man, I'm glad I could bring you on this
journey with.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Me, folks, all right, So back to the great Red
Spot grs if you prefer is pointed out by Simon
Et Hall in twenty eighteen's Historical and Contemporary Trends in
the size, drift and color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
(14:28):
published in the Astronomical Journal.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
We have roughly one hundred and fifty years going one
hundred and sixty now obviously worth of recorded observations of
the Great Red Spot that we can study. Now. They
point out that the measurement accuracy and all of these
observations depending greatly on terrestrial atmospheric conditions, the skill of
the observer, and the contrast of the Great Red Spot
with its ever moving surroundings. Because as we'll discuss, it's
(14:54):
like there's coloration changes in there as well. It's not
a consistent color of time, nor a consistent shape and size.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Nor a consistent color throughout. I mean, even within the
Great Red Spot, you've got like the sort of central
redder area, and then you've got kind of a white
band around the outside of it. And then that's within
like the wider stripes along the latitudinal stripes along Jupiter,
which are known as the zones, and the darker, more
orange or red stripes which are known as the belts.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, so in this paper they averaged out reported measurements
to better reflect the likely actual conditions in Jupiter's atmosphere.
And I'll get to some of their general details here
in a second, but we should probably point out some
of the things that they highlight here as well about
where our imagery comes from. So some of our most
impressive images, of course, of Jupiter come not from earth
(15:44):
bound telescopes and observatories, but from satellites and especially flybys
of the planet Jupiter, such as nineteen seventy four's Pioneer
ten and eleven. These revealed stark colorization more than detail.
Then we had seventy nine's Voyager and Voyager ten. I
forget which one became vegure. Interesting since we mentioned I
(16:04):
don't know which you want? Did they both become feature?
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
We all become vegure.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Eventually they revealed a more complex inner working in velocity
fields of the storm. And then we have of course
the Hubble space telescope, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, and Juno,
and these have all helped to produce just a robust
monitoring record of Jupiter and Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Certainly,
(16:31):
among other things confirming is continual evolution, that it is
a thing that is continually changing now at the time
of this study, they pointed to these general trends and stats.
You can get into a great deal of detail here.
We'll get into more detail as we get into this episode,
but they do state that, yeah, it is in fact shrinking,
(16:51):
though it's too large and too complex a system for
us to really leave it at that and do it justice.
There's a great deal of information about how it's longitude
length has continued to decrease, as has its latitudinal width,
while there's also been an observable increase in its westward
drift rate. Internal velocities have increased on the east west
(17:12):
edges and to decreased on the north and south, so
it's become a rounder over time. But again, it's like
our mind, it's so big and into even more details.
I mean, the Jupiter is enormous, This storm is enormous,
and it is also incredibly complex. So you can't again,
you can't just talk about its color. It has multiple
(17:32):
colors in it, and maybe those colors, when seen from
a great distance or rendered in just a certain way,
takes on a certain feeling of red or orange or
you know, a sort of a rusty brown. But yeah,
it's it's one of those things that we want to
be able to categorize it as more of a single
entity when I mean it is, but it is again,
(17:55):
it's a great storm. It's not it's not a it's
not like even a planet itself. We can sort of
look to as a conceivable whole, and we have just
a different system going on here.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Well, much like a storm on Earth. I mean, we
identify it as a thing, a coherent mass. But of
course that you know, it is a pattern within fluids,
within masses of fluids, and so there are fluids that
are constantly flowing in and flowing out from it.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Yeah, you get into a quick questions like, well,
there's a hurricane, what is it made of? Well it's yes,
it's made of rain drops on one level, but there's
a lot more to the answer.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
You could say it's made of energy. Yeah, yeah, I
don't have to think about that.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
But we want to be able to answer the question
with a succinct Oh, it's made of X. You know.
So this study also points out, yeah, you have changing
size and internal wind speeds that have been observable from
seventy nine through twenty seventeen, again keeping in mind the
publication date of this paper, and this seemed to result
in decreased internal circulation within the spot, intensity of the
(19:03):
storm and resulting darkness. Lightness in places has also shifted,
and again I've seen this characterized as a general darkening,
but I think that what you see discussed in more
in depth papers like this indicates something far more complex,
with coloration and brightness depending on the exact composition and
intensities within the storm system. Now, again, we absolutely don't
(19:25):
know how long the storm will ultimately last. Again, it's
an extremely temporary condition in the lifespan of a planet,
but long lasting within the context of human lives, human observation,
and in comparison to terrestrial storms. That being said, more
commentators these days seem to favor a longer continued lifespan
for the storm unless I noticed at least one paper
(19:48):
pointing out unless something really cataclysmic occurs.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I wonder what they got in mind for that, What
like like an asteroid hitting it or something.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, this got me thinking, I was like, what would
it take? So it does get rather fascinating because, first
of all, Jupiter does take a lot of hits, and
some of these hits have been like pretty brutal. It's
pointed out in a twenty nineteen NASA article by Carl B.
Hilly From July sixteenth through July twenty second. In nineteen
(20:19):
ninety four, enormous fragments of the Shoemaker Levy nine comet
crashed into Jupiter over the course of several days, and
it had just been discovered a year prior, quote, creating
huge dark scars in the planet's atmosphere and lofting superheated
plumes into its stratosphere. Yeah, and you can look up
(20:39):
images of this. I included a couple for us here, Joe. Yeah, Like,
it basically looks like the planet's a lower hemisphere was
hit with celestial buckshot.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yes, yeah, it has wounds and they're strangely kind of
scattered almost along a line.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, you see.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah. And the interesting thing is that, first of all,
these scars persisted for months and were and we're reported
to be and certainly you can look at the images
and see this for yourself. They're more noticeable than the
Great Red Spot during this time. So this was definitely
a period. And you know, I was in school at
the time. I don't remember anyone making a point out
(21:21):
of this, but like, Jupiter definitely looked different as long
as these scars were hanging out, and you know, we
didn't freak out about updating the illustrations or anything, but
these were big hits. These were the sorts of things
that if these fragments had hit the Earth, we'd be
talking about an extinction event. Wow. And observation of these
impacts I was reading at the time helped fuel efforts
(21:44):
to better protect potential space collisions involving the Earth. You know, certainly,
you know driving home that collisions like this still do
occur in our Solar system, and it's not unthinkable that
they could occur to our planet, and therefore maybe we
need to keep a better eye on what's out there.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, fortunately we're a smaller target both in terms of
size and gravitational attraction.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, Jupiter is the broad side of a barn here
any respects.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
But doesn't mean we shouldn't we shouldn't be vigilant.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, I think, as we've discussed in the show before,
like we need to have an idea of what's out there,
and all these efforts to track them and coordinate and
to possibly redirect anything that's incoming vitally important to everything
we're doing on the planet. For good or ill.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Yeah, and a plan of what to do, a well
researched plan.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yes, So these fragments that hit a hit Jupiter, they
didn't directly impact the Red Spot. We can if you
look at some of these images, and you can look
at one up here, Joe, you can still see the
much fainter spot in this July first, nineteen ninety four
image that I've included for you to the right. And
(22:57):
even if the Red Spot took a direct hit, it
seems like there's plenty of reason to assume that such
a large storm system would maybe be slightly temporarily altered,
but otherwise would remain. So we should remember that in
addition to being historically larger than the Earth in its diameter,
(23:18):
in its footprint, the storm is also quite deep, and
again is an energetic system. Now how deep fairly recent
recordings give us estimates on this. According to a twenty
twenty one Wiseman Institute of Science and NASA collaboration, the
Great Red Spot likely extends to a depth of about
five hundred kilometers or three hundred and eleven miles below
(23:39):
the planet's clouds, and you can compare that to the
storm's diameter of roughly two hundred and fifty miles or
sixteen three hundred and fifty kilometers. So what kind of
cataclysm would it take to erase the Big Red Spot.
It seems like it would need to be a cataclysm
on the sort of scale that would threaten Jupiter itself,
like a collision with a planet it or close passage
(24:01):
to a massive star. And of course, in either scenario,
the loss of the Red Spot will be the least
of our worries here on Earth.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
All right, now, Rob, you asked me to look a
little bit more into the nature of the storm. We've
said several times now that the Great Red Spot is
a storm, but what kind of storm is it?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Like?
Speaker 3 (24:22):
What's going on there? So I looked into this. The
Great Red Spot is, in the words of the authors
of a paper I think you mentioned earlier, Rob, and
we may come back to in the next part of
the series won by Sanchez la Vega at All from
twenty twenty four, the Great Red Spot is a giant
anti cyclone vortex. Now that will make more sense if
(24:46):
we break it up into its parts. Normally, when we're
talking about weather, a vortex is a rotating, revolving mass
of air, So when air begins flowing in a spiral
around a central axis. So a tornado is a type
of vortex. A hurricane is a vortex. A polar vortex
(25:06):
is a vortex. Vortex has the same meaning on Jupiter
that it does on Earth, but of course, because we're
on Jupiter, it's not rotating air. It is the atmospheric
gases found on the planet, which are mostly hydrogen and helium,
with some other things mixed in there as well, methane,
ammonia and things like that. So that's vortex. What about
(25:28):
the anti cyclone bit. Anti cyclone refers to the structure
of the vortex, and anti cyclone is easier to understand
in contrast with its opposite, which, as you might guess,
is the cyclone. A cyclone has a circulation pattern where
the wind flows counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise
(25:50):
in the southern hemisphere, and anti cyclone is the opposite.
North of the equator, an anti cyclone spins clockwise south
of the equator counterclockwise. Now from that distinction, you might
assume that cyclones and anti cyclones are essentially just mirror
images of each other, kind of like a wind that
blows from the east versus a wind that blows from
(26:11):
the west is going to be about the same as
just what direction that's going. But that's not the case
at all. On Earth, cyclones and anti cyclones tend to
have extremely different characteristics as weather. There are some exceptions,
but generally an anti cyclone is going to mean clear skies, calm,
(26:32):
dry weather on the ground, really just not much to notice.
So often an anti cyclone doesn't even really register to
us as weather. It's just like, oh, it's nice and
clear out, clear skies, it's dry, It's yeah, great, great
nice weather. Meanwhile, cyclones include stormy patterns like hurricanes and typhoons.
(26:53):
Those are both examples of a tropical cyclone. These bring clouds,
high winds, and rain. So what makes the difference. Why
would the direction of rotation of a massive air feel
so different on the ground. Well, A major factor determining
whether a cyclone or an anti cyclone pattern forms in
(27:14):
a massive air is pressure. So an anti cyclone forms
around a region of relatively high atmospheric pressure and high pressure.
The air is dense and it wants to sink. So
with an anti cyclone, you've got dry, cool air from
higher up in the atmosphere that converges near the center
(27:35):
of the pattern, and then it falls down toward the
earth because of the high pressure, it wants to sink,
and then it diverges outward from the center at the bottom.
So this is not exactly right, but just you can
roughly kind of imagine a whirlpool sucking cool, dry air
from way up high in the atmosphere and then funneling
it down to the ground where it then kind of
(27:56):
spreads out gently over the surface. Meanwhile, well, a cyclone
is formed around a region of low atmospheric pressure. It's
the opposite. In a low pressure region, warm moist air
near the surface begins to rise up and this causes
more warm moist air to flow in from all around
(28:17):
near the surface to take its place. This is sometimes
described as convergence at the surface, meaning the surface of
the Earth like the ground or the surface of the sea.
So it's flowing to the middle around the ground, and
the air flowing to the middle from the bottom is
again in contrast to the anti cyclone, where the air
flows to the middle from the top. The low pressure
(28:39):
and the convergence at the surface these tend to result
in cloud formation, rain, and high winds. So why do
these patterns have opposite rotation in the northern and southern hemispheres.
This is because of the Coriolis effect. We've talked about
this on the show before, but just to briefly refresh,
it's that manifests because it is not only the air
(29:05):
that is moving over the surface of the Earth. It's
not like the surface of the Earth is actually stationary
and the air is moving around. The surface of the
Earth is moving too. The Earth is rotating, and so
the Earth rotates counterclockwise. If you're looking down at it
from the north pole, it rotates clockwise if you're viewing
from the south pole. And as a result, objects moving
(29:27):
in the atmosphere within the rotating reference frame of the
Earth will appear to have their path deflected because the
Earth itself is moving, and it will appear to be
deflected to the right in the northern hemisphere and to
the left in the southern hemisphere, and that creates these
different patterns. That's why it's different on the different sides
of the equator. By the way the Coriolis effect, it
(29:48):
only manifests on large scales. The idea that it determines
which way the water flows down the drain and the sink.
That is a misconception that's apparently based more on things
like the shape of the sink and how you pour
the water. You see Corioli's forces popping up in like
big movements of masses like weather and ocean currents and
(30:09):
stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
The Simpsons taught us wrong on this one, they did.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yes, a rare miss for them. You know the Simpsons.
Often they get the math and science right, usually.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
If you're not familiar with what we're talking about. I
don't remember the season, but what they travel to Australia, Yes,
where where the US Embassy has a toilet, like a
high tech toilet that's been specially designed to force a
northern hemisphere directional flush effect as opposed to a southern
hemisphere flush, which, again, as we're making clear here, is not.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
A thing right to make it flow the right way. Yeah,
but anyway, back to the storms here. So again, cyclones
form the basis of most storms and bad weather on Earth.
(31:05):
I mentioned there were some exceptions. There are some occasional
large anti cyclone storms that can form for various reasons,
but that's more rare. On Earth, most of your big
storms are cyclones. Tropical cyclones like hurricanes and typhoons form
over low pressure regions in the ocean north and south
of the equator. So they form these massive rotating systems
(31:29):
where you've got warm, wet air that comes up off
of the ocean and it circulates and forms a spiral
of thunderstorms with high winds. And generally these storms they
build up in energy and intensity, and they can travel
around and they usually dissipate once the storm either moves
onto land or into cooler waters at higher latitudes, robbing
(31:52):
the storm of the warm wet air that supplies it
with energy and keeps it going. So Jupiter's Great Red
Spot is an anti cyclone vortex. It is a spiraling storm,
but unlike most of these big storms on Earth, it
is a high pressure system, not a low pressure system,
and it rotates in the anti cyclonic direction counterclockwise in
(32:15):
Jupiter's southern hemisphere. So that's the two parts of the
description anti cyclone vortex. But there was a third word.
It is a giant anti cyclone vortex, and it is
indeed giant. You were already alluding to this, rob how
big exactly is the storm. It seems currently it is
more than sixteen thousand kilometers wide, which is bigger than
(32:37):
the entire planet Earth. As we've said, Earth's diameter is
something like twelve seven hundred and fifty kilometers. The Red
Storm is more than sixteen thousand. And I also just
want to briefly compare this to the biggest storms in
the historical record on Earth. The largest storm ever recorded.
This doesn't mean necessarily the largest storm ever to occur,
(32:58):
but the biggest one we ever measured was Typhoon Tip,
a tropical cyclone that formed in the Western Pacific in
October nineteen seventy nine. Tip was huge, with a peak
diameter of more than two thy two hundred kilometers. A
common comparison people make is that if you laid the
storm out over the eastern United States, the edges of
(33:21):
the storm would reach from Texas to New England, just
gigantic by Earth standards. But of course, the Great Red
Spot is not only a lot bigger than that storm,
it's bigger than the whole planet. And it is not
even currently at its maximum size. As you were talking about, Rob,
you know, when it was first observed, the diameter of
the spot was estimated to be almost fifty thousand kilometers,
(33:44):
which is more than three times the width of Earth.
I think actually almost four times the diameter of Earth.
And so again contained in that fact about the change
over time is the implication that the Great Red Spot
fluctuates greatly in terms of size and structure. Another thing
is the contrast in intensity with the biggest storms we
know about on Earth. In Typhoon Tip, the wind gusts
(34:08):
reached more than three hundred kilometers per hour, which is
absolutely crazy. That is really really high wind. But the
Great Red Spot storm is even more intense. I've read
different numbers here for the wind speeds. I'm not sure,
but I wonder if any discrepancies in the accounting might
have to do with the fact that there's no solid
surface below to measure the winds against. I don't know
(34:31):
if it has to do with the fact that it's
fluid on fluid, but anyway, I was looking for a
good source on this, and I used a fact page
from NASA's Juno mission, which was focused on Jupiter's atmosphere,
among other things. So that seems to be a good authority,
and they peg the range of wind speeds within the
Great Red Spot at four hundred and thirty to six
hundred and eighty kilometers per hour or two hundred and
(34:54):
seventy four to twenty five miles per hour. That would
be within the outer reaches where the winds are the
most intense. In any case, way way more powerful than
the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in history on Earth.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's just an absolute monster on a
scale that staggers the imagination, challenges the imagination, and it's
and it's it's a planet that is again it's a
gas giant. As we've been driving home, there is no
hard surface like it's we we can't even picture ourselves
in the midst of it like we have an easier
(35:29):
time picturing ourselves, of course, on the surface of something
like Venus, which in and of itself is it a
completely alien and inhospitable environment.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Yeah, but would kill you. But there's something to stand on.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
There's at least something to stand and crumble voluntary. Yeah. Here,
it's it's just it's hell, it's mean Stupiter, baby.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
But so yes. The Red Spot of Jupiter is a
giant high pressure storm in contrast to most of Earth's
low pressure storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter's southern hemisphere
swirling in the anti cyclonic direction. But there are a
bunch of interesting questions that remain, some of which we
have fairly good ideas of how to answer, some of
(36:12):
which are much more mysterious, and there are only some
kind of educated guesses questions like the one you raised,
how long is it going to be around? One question
that's interesting is how does this storm persist for so long?
Over time? Storms on Earth don't last that long, and
also the question of how did it form in the
first place. So I think we should come back and
(36:33):
do a part two on the Great Red Spot.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Rob Yeah, yeah, get into why this color. Well, you
might think it's the jelly filling of the planet, but
that's inaccurate. If you've read that somewhere, that's a lie.
And we'll look at more plausible answers to that question
in the next episode. In the meantime, since we have
several days before that episode will come out, we would
(36:57):
love to hear from you if you have, especially, I'm
interested for examples from various science fiction films where Jupiter
pops up in the background, or at least is the
red storm is acknowledged, and then I want to know
what year that is supposed to take place and how
we might therefore couch that in our very vague and
(37:19):
shifting understanding of how long this storm has lasted and
how long it will last. Just a reminder to everyone
out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursday, short form episodes on Wednesdays 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, well, we have different social media accounts.
(37:41):
You can follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts,
and on Instagram we're s twob yam podcast, so if
you use that you can find us there.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
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 us to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we're going to be talking about the
great Red Spot of Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
That's right. We've you know, we've talked about the Jovian
moons before Jupiter comes up time and time again. We
did an episode talking about, you know, then the mythical
connotations of Jupiter for sure, but you know, we've never
done an episode just on Jupiter, and we're not going
to do that today. We're focusing on a detail of Jupiter.
I think Jupiter is just too big, Like, is it
(00:46):
too big of a topic? Well, probably not. We could
cover it in multiple episodes, but Jupiter is just so
large that it feels intimidating to even attempt to cover
all of it.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Oh, we're doing it piece by piece, defeat in detail.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That's right, like eating an elephant, as they say. Yeah,
Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar system, commanding,
as we've covered before, its own vast system of moons.
Its massiveness is such that a Jupiter mass is actually
used as a unit to describe the massive other massive
cosmic bodies, and given its size and proximity to Earth,
(01:20):
humans have known of the fifth planet since very ancient times,
so long before the invention of the telescope, with observations
made by ancient Babylonians, ancient Chinese, among others. It's bright
and it is observable to the naked eye.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Right, you may in fact associate Jupiter with the dawn
of the age of the telescope, and that could be
because Jupiter is very important, and say the story of
Galileo's early observations. Like Galileo, one of the most important
things he saw early on the telescope was the moons
of Jupiter. He discovered the Galilean moons named after him. Now,
(01:57):
but yeah, we knew about the planet as a point
of life in the sky, one of the movable stars
going back thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's right. So there are a number of what I mean,
Jupiter is an immensely important planet as in addition to
just being immense in all sorts of ways. The main
thing we're going to be talking about here today, though,
is is less essential but more of an interesting detail,
and indeed an iconic detail of its appearance, that being
(02:25):
the great Red Spot, the big red storm that is
visible on the planet Jupiter, and I think, more to
the point, is highly visible in every illustration you've ever
seen of the Solar System, every drawing of the Solar System,
and specifically the planet Jupiter, that you ever had to
do or chose to do as a child and onward.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I would say that the Great Red Spot sort of
gives Jupiter a face that some of the other gas
giants don't have. Though, as we may discuss later on
in this episode or the next, there are similar visible
weather patterns and storms on some of the other gas giants.
There's a big spot on Saturn, there's a spot on Neptune,
(03:10):
as we've talked about before. But I would say none
of those other features are as clear and easy to
see and as just kind of face like as the
red spot on Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, like a great red eye staring at us, judging us,
maybe protecting us a little bit. And you know, of
course it's not really an eye. You know, I'm glad
it's nothing. Oh what if it was just a blemish
on Jupiter's face and we've just been staring at it?
The whole time.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
So rude, my belts are up here.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, so yeah. Even with great vision and optimal eyesight,
humans were unable to glimpse the details of the gas
giants swirling surface until the invention of the telescope in
the early seventeenth century CEE. So, to be clear, humans
have only been capable of observing the Great Red Spot
of Jupiter for roughly three centuries. And the really interesting
(04:04):
thing on top of this is that the planet's key
identifying mark, again that every school child can replicate, is
neither a permanent or even long lasting feature, certainly in
terms of the life of a planet, but rather a
temporary atmospheric occurrence that seemingly comes and goes. We've only
been observing it for a very short amount of time,
(04:25):
you know, it's as a human observed phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, and I guess it can actually be weird in
terms of its existence in time from two different directions.
On one hand, if you think of it as a
feature of the surface of a planet, the fact that
it's a weather pattern makes it actually quite kind of
transient and unstable. You know, it sort of undermines the
ground beneath your feet. To think that the face of
(04:50):
another planet in our Solar system, which we learned when
we were children in school, could be changing within our lifetimes.
Even on the other hand, if you think about it
as a weather pattern, it's kind of freaky how stable
it is for decades or even hundreds of years.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. All right, Well, let's
get into the history of the observation of the Great
Red Spot. So, given that that observation of the Great
Red Spot wasn't possible before the telescope, when do human
observers start noticing it during the telescope era? Based on
what I was reading here, the earliest possible observation, and
(05:30):
I think, ultimately, as we'll discuss, unlikely observation dates back
to May ninth, sixteen sixty four, and that's when seventeenth
century English polymath and author of micrographia Robert Hook observes
something on the face of Jupiter that he described as
a small spot moving east to west. Quote in the
(05:51):
biggest of the three obscure belts of Jupiter. Now we
could easily do a whole episode on Robert Hook. He
had his hands in multiple areas of some aientific inquiry.
He was especially active in the study of the microscopic
world using new microscopic technology. His book Micrographia concerns this work.
In fact, I'm to understand he coined the term cell
(06:12):
in this book, so he was concerned with the little things,
but also the ginormous things such as Jupiter. But based
on a subsequent sixteen sixty six observation and nineteen eighty
seven analysis by Marco for Lani in the Journal of
the British Astronomical Association, I was reading at its thought
(06:33):
that this would have situated the spot in what is
now known as the North Equatorial Belt, the Great Black
Belt according to the American Physical Society, while the Great
Red Spot that we know today is in the South
Equatorial Belt. So, given what we've already explored and what
we'll be getting into, you might well wonder if this
(06:54):
was actually a different storm that Hook was observing. Well, possibly,
But for Lani's argument here was that Hook actually was
looking at the shadow of or the transit, you know,
the silhouette of the second largest Jovian moon, Callisto, or
some other transit shadow. The Royal Society backed Hook's claim, however,
(07:17):
and there are you know, various arguments about you know,
nationalism and so forth that would have been wound up
in that judgment at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, so I've read the same analysis. So the question is,
did he observe the same storm that we see today
as the Great Red Spot? Probably not. Was it maybe
a different storm than we see today possibly, or was
it the shadow cast or the silhouette of one of
the moons, And for Lani says the latter.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yeah, yeah, And that seems to be a fairly convincing
argument here. Now. The other possibility in terms of first
or earliest documented sighting of the red spot takes us
to sixteen sixty five, just a year after Hook's sighting,
and that's when Italian French astronomer Giovanni Cassini noted it
for the first time. In his letters, he described weeding
(08:08):
out different transit shadow spots and noting quote a permanent
one which was often seen to return in the same
place with the same size and shape. So he totaled
thirteen observations. He calculated its rotation. He did not note
the color, perhaps according to the Journal of the British
Astronomical Association, because the instrumentation was too low light to
(08:29):
really pick up on any colorization. Now Again, historians between
these two tend to favor the Cassini observation because it
seems that Cassini is definitely observing. There's a stronger case
to be made that he's observing an actual storm here,
an actual storm spot on Jupiter. But an important distinction
to make here is that this might not have been
(08:50):
the same storm that we see and know today as
being the iconic Great Storm of Jupiter. The article that
I referenced on the Journal of the British Astronomical Association
titled May sixteen sixty four Hook versus Cassini, who discovered
Jupiter's red spot, points out that that first of all,
(09:12):
the history of the red spot or spots is imperfect,
and that no one observed the red spot on Jupiter
after seventeen thirteen until eighteen thirty one, that's when Heinrich
Schwabe observed it and then described in much greater detail
by American astronomer C. W. Pritchett in eighteen seventy eight.
Often often references being the individual to quote unquote rediscover
(09:35):
the great Red Spot, So the permanent spot of Cassini
and the great red spot that astronomers have been observing
since at least eighteen thirty one, they might be two
very different storms. Since around twenty twelve, scientists have observed
a shrinking of the Great Red Spot, and recent flaking
has also led some to think that it might it
might one day disappear. Some have predicted in the past
(09:57):
as little as decades from the point of observation. Others,
and certainly I think more recent observers, have urged more
caution on this. I mean, I say caution, not that
this is really any threat to us whatsoever, but it
They tend to suggest that it may last for some centuries.
(10:17):
Yet I'm not sure if it will last to twenty
four oh one. Hard to say, But this is ultimately
one of those things where no one really knows, because
again it's a storm. Everyone is familiar with the difficulties
we have in predicting how the weather works on our planet.
You know, it's a complex system. Likewise, it's difficult even
(10:39):
with Jupiter to figure out, Well, this storm has lasted
for decades at least, but will it last for decades, more,
centuries more?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
We just don't know, right, So not caution in the
sense of it could harm us, but maybe caution in
the sense of like, don't go to one of the
betting markets and put big money on the storm being
there or disappearing in a certain timeline. There's not a
whole lot we know.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
It would be very interesting to see how the public
responded to it, because I think back to, of course
changes in categorizations or adjustments and categorizations of Pluto as
a planet or some other astral body, and you know,
people ended up having strong opinions about that because the
(11:22):
idea that Pluto's not on the list anymore. It made
them feel threatened at times, are wounded in a way.
And I can imagine a similar reaction to scientists telling everyone,
you know, the red spot in Jupiter is not there anymore,
so don't draw Jupiter the same way, and please everyone
make corrections to your textbooks.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
You know, thinking back on the Pluto thing, some people
I think genuinely do get frustrated when they have to
update what they know about something. But on the other hand,
I think a lot of that was just people trying
to be cute. Yes, just making a little jokey post
on Facebook, like don't take my Pluto away. But somehow
I don't know it like it's something that I think
(12:05):
snowballed from a mostly ironic posting to begin with, into like,
I don't know, somehow an actual kind of sentiment about
like I'm dissatisfied with astronomy today.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah. It kind of at least dips its toes, even
in jest, into sort of science denial, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Yes, though, of course the idea of a planet is
not like a consistent objective category over time. The whole
thing was like, we're updating the definition of what we
consider a planet.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, I mean, we could have gone in the other
direction and just added a list of other things on
the end there. I can't imagine people wanted to memorize
more planets, So you know, I feel like this was
a good balance.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah, yeah,
you'd want to add series to.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
The list you want to. But that's Pluto. Pluto small
and ultimately insignificant compared to the glory of Jupiter. And
and of course it's red Storm, It's great red spot.
There is another, by the way, at least one more.
There is the Little Red Spot, also known as Red
Spot Junior or oval Ba, which formed in nineteen ninety
(13:12):
eight and two thousand from three white oval shaped storms.
So again, like new stuff pops up new details. If
you look at some of the glorious detailed imagery that
we now have of the storms of Jupiter, I mean
it is a complex system. It is like a crazy
swirl of madness there.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Sorry, sorry, I just had to check something off, Mike,
because I had a massive musical confusion in my brain.
When you said Red Spot Junior. I thought I was
hearing that to the tune of the theme song of
a cartoon I watched as a child called James Bond Junior,
Red Spot Junior. But then it turned out I went
and checked and I wasn't even remembering the theme song, right.
(13:53):
I think I was hearing the tune of the Transformers
theme in my head, but putting James Bond Junior.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I don't remember James Bond Jr.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Oh Man, I'm glad I could bring you on this
journey with.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Me, folks, all right, So back to the great Red
Spot grs if you prefer is pointed out by Simon
Et Hall in twenty eighteen's Historical and Contemporary Trends in
the size, drift and color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
(14:28):
published in the Astronomical Journal.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
We have roughly one hundred and fifty years going one
hundred and sixty now obviously worth of recorded observations of
the Great Red Spot that we can study. Now. They
point out that the measurement accuracy and all of these
observations depending greatly on terrestrial atmospheric conditions, the skill of
the observer, and the contrast of the Great Red Spot
with its ever moving surroundings. Because as we'll discuss, it's
(14:54):
like there's coloration changes in there as well. It's not
a consistent color of time, nor a consistent shape and size.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Nor a consistent color throughout. I mean, even within the
Great Red Spot, you've got like the sort of central
redder area, and then you've got kind of a white
band around the outside of it. And then that's within
like the wider stripes along the latitudinal stripes along Jupiter,
which are known as the zones, and the darker, more
orange or red stripes which are known as the belts.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, so in this paper they averaged out reported measurements
to better reflect the likely actual conditions in Jupiter's atmosphere.
And I'll get to some of their general details here
in a second, but we should probably point out some
of the things that they highlight here as well about
where our imagery comes from. So some of our most
impressive images, of course, of Jupiter come not from earth
(15:44):
bound telescopes and observatories, but from satellites and especially flybys
of the planet Jupiter, such as nineteen seventy four's Pioneer
ten and eleven. These revealed stark colorization more than detail.
Then we had seventy nine's Voyager and Voyager ten. I
forget which one became vegure. Interesting since we mentioned I
(16:04):
don't know which you want? Did they both become feature?
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
We all become vegure.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Eventually they revealed a more complex inner working in velocity
fields of the storm. And then we have of course
the Hubble space telescope, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, and Juno,
and these have all helped to produce just a robust
monitoring record of Jupiter and Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Certainly,
(16:31):
among other things confirming is continual evolution, that it is
a thing that is continually changing now at the time
of this study, they pointed to these general trends and stats.
You can get into a great deal of detail here.
We'll get into more detail as we get into this episode,
but they do state that, yeah, it is in fact shrinking,
(16:51):
though it's too large and too complex a system for
us to really leave it at that and do it justice.
There's a great deal of information about how it's longitude
length has continued to decrease, as has its latitudinal width,
while there's also been an observable increase in its westward
drift rate. Internal velocities have increased on the east west
(17:12):
edges and to decreased on the north and south, so
it's become a rounder over time. But again, it's like
our mind, it's so big and into even more details.
I mean, the Jupiter is enormous, This storm is enormous,
and it is also incredibly complex. So you can't again,
you can't just talk about its color. It has multiple
(17:32):
colors in it, and maybe those colors, when seen from
a great distance or rendered in just a certain way,
takes on a certain feeling of red or orange or
you know, a sort of a rusty brown. But yeah,
it's it's one of those things that we want to
be able to categorize it as more of a single
entity when I mean it is, but it is again,
(17:55):
it's a great storm. It's not it's not a it's
not like even a planet itself. We can sort of
look to as a conceivable whole, and we have just
a different system going on here.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Well, much like a storm on Earth. I mean, we
identify it as a thing, a coherent mass. But of
course that you know, it is a pattern within fluids,
within masses of fluids, and so there are fluids that
are constantly flowing in and flowing out from it.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Yeah, you get into a quick questions like, well,
there's a hurricane, what is it made of? Well it's yes,
it's made of rain drops on one level, but there's
a lot more to the answer.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
You could say it's made of energy. Yeah, yeah, I
don't have to think about that.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
But we want to be able to answer the question
with a succinct Oh, it's made of X. You know.
So this study also points out, yeah, you have changing
size and internal wind speeds that have been observable from
seventy nine through twenty seventeen, again keeping in mind the
publication date of this paper, and this seemed to result
in decreased internal circulation within the spot, intensity of the
(19:03):
storm and resulting darkness. Lightness in places has also shifted,
and again I've seen this characterized as a general darkening,
but I think that what you see discussed in more
in depth papers like this indicates something far more complex,
with coloration and brightness depending on the exact composition and
intensities within the storm system. Now, again, we absolutely don't
(19:25):
know how long the storm will ultimately last. Again, it's
an extremely temporary condition in the lifespan of a planet,
but long lasting within the context of human lives, human observation,
and in comparison to terrestrial storms. That being said, more
commentators these days seem to favor a longer continued lifespan
for the storm unless I noticed at least one paper
(19:48):
pointing out unless something really cataclysmic occurs.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I wonder what they got in mind for that, What
like like an asteroid hitting it or something.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, this got me thinking, I was like, what would
it take? So it does get rather fascinating because, first
of all, Jupiter does take a lot of hits, and
some of these hits have been like pretty brutal. It's
pointed out in a twenty nineteen NASA article by Carl B.
Hilly From July sixteenth through July twenty second. In nineteen
(20:19):
ninety four, enormous fragments of the Shoemaker Levy nine comet
crashed into Jupiter over the course of several days, and
it had just been discovered a year prior, quote, creating
huge dark scars in the planet's atmosphere and lofting superheated
plumes into its stratosphere. Yeah, and you can look up
(20:39):
images of this. I included a couple for us here, Joe. Yeah, Like,
it basically looks like the planet's a lower hemisphere was
hit with celestial buckshot.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yes, yeah, it has wounds and they're strangely kind of
scattered almost along a line.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, you see.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah. And the interesting thing is that, first of all,
these scars persisted for months and were and we're reported
to be and certainly you can look at the images
and see this for yourself. They're more noticeable than the
Great Red Spot during this time. So this was definitely
a period. And you know, I was in school at
the time. I don't remember anyone making a point out
(21:21):
of this, but like, Jupiter definitely looked different as long
as these scars were hanging out, and you know, we
didn't freak out about updating the illustrations or anything, but
these were big hits. These were the sorts of things
that if these fragments had hit the Earth, we'd be
talking about an extinction event. Wow. And observation of these
impacts I was reading at the time helped fuel efforts
(21:44):
to better protect potential space collisions involving the Earth. You know, certainly,
you know driving home that collisions like this still do
occur in our Solar system, and it's not unthinkable that
they could occur to our planet, and therefore maybe we
need to keep a better eye on what's out there.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, fortunately we're a smaller target both in terms of
size and gravitational attraction.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, Jupiter is the broad side of a barn here
any respects.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
But doesn't mean we shouldn't we shouldn't be vigilant.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, I think, as we've discussed in the show before,
like we need to have an idea of what's out there,
and all these efforts to track them and coordinate and
to possibly redirect anything that's incoming vitally important to everything
we're doing on the planet. For good or ill.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Yeah, and a plan of what to do, a well
researched plan.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yes, So these fragments that hit a hit Jupiter, they
didn't directly impact the Red Spot. We can if you
look at some of these images, and you can look
at one up here, Joe, you can still see the
much fainter spot in this July first, nineteen ninety four
image that I've included for you to the right. And
(22:57):
even if the Red Spot took a direct hit, it
seems like there's plenty of reason to assume that such
a large storm system would maybe be slightly temporarily altered,
but otherwise would remain. So we should remember that in
addition to being historically larger than the Earth in its diameter,
(23:18):
in its footprint, the storm is also quite deep, and
again is an energetic system. Now how deep fairly recent
recordings give us estimates on this. According to a twenty
twenty one Wiseman Institute of Science and NASA collaboration, the
Great Red Spot likely extends to a depth of about
five hundred kilometers or three hundred and eleven miles below
(23:39):
the planet's clouds, and you can compare that to the
storm's diameter of roughly two hundred and fifty miles or
sixteen three hundred and fifty kilometers. So what kind of
cataclysm would it take to erase the Big Red Spot.
It seems like it would need to be a cataclysm
on the sort of scale that would threaten Jupiter itself,
like a collision with a planet it or close passage
(24:01):
to a massive star. And of course, in either scenario,
the loss of the Red Spot will be the least
of our worries here on Earth.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
All right, now, Rob, you asked me to look a
little bit more into the nature of the storm. We've
said several times now that the Great Red Spot is
a storm, but what kind of storm is it?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Like?
Speaker 3 (24:22):
What's going on there? So I looked into this. The
Great Red Spot is, in the words of the authors
of a paper I think you mentioned earlier, Rob, and
we may come back to in the next part of
the series won by Sanchez la Vega at All from
twenty twenty four, the Great Red Spot is a giant
anti cyclone vortex. Now that will make more sense if
(24:46):
we break it up into its parts. Normally, when we're
talking about weather, a vortex is a rotating, revolving mass
of air, So when air begins flowing in a spiral
around a central axis. So a tornado is a type
of vortex. A hurricane is a vortex. A polar vortex
(25:06):
is a vortex. Vortex has the same meaning on Jupiter
that it does on Earth, but of course, because we're
on Jupiter, it's not rotating air. It is the atmospheric
gases found on the planet, which are mostly hydrogen and helium,
with some other things mixed in there as well, methane,
ammonia and things like that. So that's vortex. What about
(25:28):
the anti cyclone bit. Anti cyclone refers to the structure
of the vortex, and anti cyclone is easier to understand
in contrast with its opposite, which, as you might guess,
is the cyclone. A cyclone has a circulation pattern where
the wind flows counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise
(25:50):
in the southern hemisphere, and anti cyclone is the opposite.
North of the equator, an anti cyclone spins clockwise south
of the equator counterclockwise. Now from that distinction, you might
assume that cyclones and anti cyclones are essentially just mirror
images of each other, kind of like a wind that
blows from the east versus a wind that blows from
(26:11):
the west is going to be about the same as
just what direction that's going. But that's not the case
at all. On Earth, cyclones and anti cyclones tend to
have extremely different characteristics as weather. There are some exceptions,
but generally an anti cyclone is going to mean clear skies, calm,
(26:32):
dry weather on the ground, really just not much to notice.
So often an anti cyclone doesn't even really register to
us as weather. It's just like, oh, it's nice and
clear out, clear skies, it's dry, It's yeah, great, great
nice weather. Meanwhile, cyclones include stormy patterns like hurricanes and typhoons.
(26:53):
Those are both examples of a tropical cyclone. These bring clouds,
high winds, and rain. So what makes the difference. Why
would the direction of rotation of a massive air feel
so different on the ground. Well, A major factor determining
whether a cyclone or an anti cyclone pattern forms in
(27:14):
a massive air is pressure. So an anti cyclone forms
around a region of relatively high atmospheric pressure and high pressure.
The air is dense and it wants to sink. So
with an anti cyclone, you've got dry, cool air from
higher up in the atmosphere that converges near the center
(27:35):
of the pattern, and then it falls down toward the
earth because of the high pressure, it wants to sink,
and then it diverges outward from the center at the bottom.
So this is not exactly right, but just you can
roughly kind of imagine a whirlpool sucking cool, dry air
from way up high in the atmosphere and then funneling
it down to the ground where it then kind of
(27:56):
spreads out gently over the surface. Meanwhile, well, a cyclone
is formed around a region of low atmospheric pressure. It's
the opposite. In a low pressure region, warm moist air
near the surface begins to rise up and this causes
more warm moist air to flow in from all around
(28:17):
near the surface to take its place. This is sometimes
described as convergence at the surface, meaning the surface of
the Earth like the ground or the surface of the sea.
So it's flowing to the middle around the ground, and
the air flowing to the middle from the bottom is
again in contrast to the anti cyclone, where the air
flows to the middle from the top. The low pressure
(28:39):
and the convergence at the surface these tend to result
in cloud formation, rain, and high winds. So why do
these patterns have opposite rotation in the northern and southern hemispheres.
This is because of the Coriolis effect. We've talked about
this on the show before, but just to briefly refresh,
it's that manifests because it is not only the air
(29:05):
that is moving over the surface of the Earth. It's
not like the surface of the Earth is actually stationary
and the air is moving around. The surface of the
Earth is moving too. The Earth is rotating, and so
the Earth rotates counterclockwise. If you're looking down at it
from the north pole, it rotates clockwise if you're viewing
from the south pole. And as a result, objects moving
(29:27):
in the atmosphere within the rotating reference frame of the
Earth will appear to have their path deflected because the
Earth itself is moving, and it will appear to be
deflected to the right in the northern hemisphere and to
the left in the southern hemisphere, and that creates these
different patterns. That's why it's different on the different sides
of the equator. By the way the Coriolis effect, it
(29:48):
only manifests on large scales. The idea that it determines
which way the water flows down the drain and the sink.
That is a misconception that's apparently based more on things
like the shape of the sink and how you pour
the water. You see Corioli's forces popping up in like
big movements of masses like weather and ocean currents and
(30:09):
stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
The Simpsons taught us wrong on this one, they did.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yes, a rare miss for them. You know the Simpsons.
Often they get the math and science right, usually.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
If you're not familiar with what we're talking about. I
don't remember the season, but what they travel to Australia, Yes,
where where the US Embassy has a toilet, like a
high tech toilet that's been specially designed to force a
northern hemisphere directional flush effect as opposed to a southern
hemisphere flush, which, again, as we're making clear here, is not.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
A thing right to make it flow the right way. Yeah,
but anyway, back to the storms here. So again, cyclones
form the basis of most storms and bad weather on Earth.
(31:05):
I mentioned there were some exceptions. There are some occasional
large anti cyclone storms that can form for various reasons,
but that's more rare. On Earth, most of your big
storms are cyclones. Tropical cyclones like hurricanes and typhoons form
over low pressure regions in the ocean north and south
of the equator. So they form these massive rotating systems
(31:29):
where you've got warm, wet air that comes up off
of the ocean and it circulates and forms a spiral
of thunderstorms with high winds. And generally these storms they
build up in energy and intensity, and they can travel
around and they usually dissipate once the storm either moves
onto land or into cooler waters at higher latitudes, robbing
(31:52):
the storm of the warm wet air that supplies it
with energy and keeps it going. So Jupiter's Great Red
Spot is an anti cyclone vortex. It is a spiraling storm,
but unlike most of these big storms on Earth, it
is a high pressure system, not a low pressure system,
and it rotates in the anti cyclonic direction counterclockwise in
(32:15):
Jupiter's southern hemisphere. So that's the two parts of the
description anti cyclone vortex. But there was a third word.
It is a giant anti cyclone vortex, and it is
indeed giant. You were already alluding to this, rob how
big exactly is the storm. It seems currently it is
more than sixteen thousand kilometers wide, which is bigger than
(32:37):
the entire planet Earth. As we've said, Earth's diameter is
something like twelve seven hundred and fifty kilometers. The Red
Storm is more than sixteen thousand. And I also just
want to briefly compare this to the biggest storms in
the historical record on Earth. The largest storm ever recorded.
This doesn't mean necessarily the largest storm ever to occur,
(32:58):
but the biggest one we ever measured was Typhoon Tip,
a tropical cyclone that formed in the Western Pacific in
October nineteen seventy nine. Tip was huge, with a peak
diameter of more than two thy two hundred kilometers. A
common comparison people make is that if you laid the
storm out over the eastern United States, the edges of
(33:21):
the storm would reach from Texas to New England, just
gigantic by Earth standards. But of course, the Great Red
Spot is not only a lot bigger than that storm,
it's bigger than the whole planet. And it is not
even currently at its maximum size. As you were talking about, Rob,
you know, when it was first observed, the diameter of
the spot was estimated to be almost fifty thousand kilometers,
(33:44):
which is more than three times the width of Earth.
I think actually almost four times the diameter of Earth.
And so again contained in that fact about the change
over time is the implication that the Great Red Spot
fluctuates greatly in terms of size and structure. Another thing
is the contrast in intensity with the biggest storms we
know about on Earth. In Typhoon Tip, the wind gusts
(34:08):
reached more than three hundred kilometers per hour, which is
absolutely crazy. That is really really high wind. But the
Great Red Spot storm is even more intense. I've read
different numbers here for the wind speeds. I'm not sure,
but I wonder if any discrepancies in the accounting might
have to do with the fact that there's no solid
surface below to measure the winds against. I don't know
(34:31):
if it has to do with the fact that it's
fluid on fluid, but anyway, I was looking for a
good source on this, and I used a fact page
from NASA's Juno mission, which was focused on Jupiter's atmosphere,
among other things. So that seems to be a good authority,
and they peg the range of wind speeds within the
Great Red Spot at four hundred and thirty to six
hundred and eighty kilometers per hour or two hundred and
(34:54):
seventy four to twenty five miles per hour. That would
be within the outer reaches where the winds are the
most intense. In any case, way way more powerful than
the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in history on Earth.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's just an absolute monster on a
scale that staggers the imagination, challenges the imagination, and it's
and it's it's a planet that is again it's a
gas giant. As we've been driving home, there is no
hard surface like it's we we can't even picture ourselves
in the midst of it like we have an easier
(35:29):
time picturing ourselves, of course, on the surface of something
like Venus, which in and of itself is it a
completely alien and inhospitable environment.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Yeah, but would kill you. But there's something to stand on.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
There's at least something to stand and crumble voluntary. Yeah. Here,
it's it's just it's hell, it's mean Stupiter, baby.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
But so yes. The Red Spot of Jupiter is a
giant high pressure storm in contrast to most of Earth's
low pressure storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter's southern hemisphere
swirling in the anti cyclonic direction. But there are a
bunch of interesting questions that remain, some of which we
have fairly good ideas of how to answer, some of
(36:12):
which are much more mysterious, and there are only some
kind of educated guesses questions like the one you raised,
how long is it going to be around? One question
that's interesting is how does this storm persist for so long?
Over time? Storms on Earth don't last that long, and
also the question of how did it form in the
first place. So I think we should come back and
(36:33):
do a part two on the Great Red Spot.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Rob Yeah, yeah, get into why this color. Well, you
might think it's the jelly filling of the planet, but
that's inaccurate. If you've read that somewhere, that's a lie.
And we'll look at more plausible answers to that question
in the next episode. In the meantime, since we have
several days before that episode will come out, we would
(36:57):
love to hear from you if you have, especially, I'm
interested for examples from various science fiction films where Jupiter
pops up in the background, or at least is the
red storm is acknowledged, and then I want to know
what year that is supposed to take place and how
we might therefore couch that in our very vague and
(37:19):
shifting understanding of how long this storm has lasted and
how long it will last. Just a reminder to everyone
out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursday, short form episodes on Wednesdays 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, well, we have different social media accounts.
(37:41):
You can follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts,
and on Instagram we're s twob yam podcast, so if
you use that you can find us there.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
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 us to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
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