May 13, 2025 • 39 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, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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 oriented fashion. But I was looking
(00:41):
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 published in Playboy magazine, and it's
(01:03):
set in the year twenty fifty. It is titled A
Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Oh yeah, huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This
is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it
It is?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, this is a 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,
(01:36):
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 thinks, well,
maybe I'll see it next time.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism
of the story, but this did cause me to think,
with the Great Red sp 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
(02:13):
on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd
just be on land.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, Like I love the shape of Australia. I really
want to visit it somedays so I can appreciate its shape.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
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, winds whipping around you.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So this, this story can be obtained, I've believe in
at 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
(02:59):
had been a tempte 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 (03:17):
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 2 (03:27):
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 (03:38):
It, absolutely aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays
dwelling there.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
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
(04:05):
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 (04:23):
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
(04:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Here.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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 one side of the equatorial stripe. And
(05:12):
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, and these observations more than one
hundred years ago, it was gigantic and it was way
(05:35):
more flattened out.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, definitely look up this eighteen seventy nine photograph if
you have the ability to do so. Let's see. We
also discussed the nature of the storm itself, somewhat an
enormous anticyclone 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
(05:57):
concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet calls Home.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
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
(06:21):
white that is sometimes known as the hollow, and then
inside that you've got the redder or more orange oval.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
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 guess to make, but
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
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 2 (06:55):
You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try
and hide it. That's how you know what's inside, and
maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
You get a little peak with the durbble.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
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,
(07:28):
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 observations 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
(07:51):
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 in 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 Lavega at all, and
(08:14):
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
(08:36):
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 that
those changes match up with other changes and looking to
(08:58):
why those changes would in fact impact the colorization. The
paper by Simon at All 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,
(09:22):
they point out, 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 (09:35):
Oh that's interesting. So it seems to be shifting to
the red when the winds are moving faster.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, that's my understanding of it here. But one of
the big things that they drive home is that correlating
the Great Red Spot's color changes with an actual physical
mechanism is really challenging, and so a lot of the
work in these papers seems to really get into that
and come up with various hypotheses as to how this
could be occurring. They point out that drift rate slash
(10:05):
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 in 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 might
(10:27):
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 wash past you, and I
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. But also I have to acknowledge that everything
(10:49):
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? Like? 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
(11:14):
given color, sometimes collectively with other chromophors in general, talking
about in general about 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
(11:37):
high up into the atmosphere these particles are pushed. Now,
one there's a particular NASA JPL scientist who is the
lead author and sometimes I think maybe the 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
(11:59):
Haze by West, Bains, and Friedson. And in 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
(12:20):
the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on 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 biota living organisms. And
(12:41):
the paper that they're citing for this idea was a
nineteen seventy six paper by Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter
who speculated on the possibility of not only life on Jupiter,
but a Jovian ecology.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
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
(13:15):
landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the
atmosphere of Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
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
(13:42):
clear that some locals, the Great Red Spot, for example,
may be more favored than others because of higher abundances
of organic molecules prevailing up drafts for other reasons. So yeah,
to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely
held candidate for a play in our solar system where
you could find extraterrestrial life. Like It's not like a
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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 (14:39):
Okay, so getting getting energy from the sun, making its
food that way and then sinking down passively through the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
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
(15:10):
hunts on the floaters, or maybe it's a Manda ray.
You know, you can sort of go wild with the
imagination here.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
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 that's interesting is, you know, this is exactly
(15:41):
the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clark employed in his
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 and
Saltpeter paper here.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, though, of course Clark was quite concerned in anyways
with plausibility. But he's also just trying to tell a
good story.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
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,
(16:28):
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 attention. So
there was one from twenty fourteen. This was an idea
presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, and
(16:49):
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
(17:09):
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,
(17:33):
and laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible.
So the idea here is that we have these chromophores,
these ammonium 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,
(17:54):
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
(18:15):
a sunburn.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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 2 (18:25):
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 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 which there are red chromophores that are pushed
(18:49):
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
like it's so red eyes, it's 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
than others. But that makes that I do love the
(19:11):
idea that, hey, what if it's read because it's just
full of life? That would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, what if we're looking at algol blooms and certain
bands all on the surface.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
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 (19:36):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:22):
was the same spot and it was there the whole time.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, otherwise people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting,
you know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
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 and go. 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
(20:50):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:32):
and Polytechnic University of Catalonia. And in addition to this paper,
I relied on some explanation and analysis from several articles,
especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and science
communicator Phil Plait 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
(21:55):
structure of Jupiter in 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
(22:15):
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
(22:39):
makes it 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 the smack. Instead,
(23:01):
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
(23:26):
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
(23:48):
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,
(24:09):
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.
(24:31):
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 of 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
(24:51):
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 2 (25:04):
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 we
(25:26):
can live, so Yeah, what do we mean by surface
with a planet anyway?
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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 2 (25:44):
Yeah, Like, how would like balloon based floating organisms judge
life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like
bottom dwellers or something. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
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 white
(26:17):
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 deep within Jupiter itself,
(26:42):
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 hotid rises up through low pressure
areas of the atmosphere all the way up to the top,
(27:05):
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
(27:26):
this extremely fast rotation causes a pronounced Coriolis effect, which
we talked about last time in the context of Earth.
Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more extreme than Earth's because Jupiter
is larger and spinning faster, and this pronounced Coriolis effect
(27:46):
creates powerful jet streams running parallel to Jupiter's equator. These
jet streams form the boundaries 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
(28:10):
is a low pressure area where warm fluid rises up
through the atmosphere and it is 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
(28:32):
back down into the atmosphere, where the side facing the
pole is bounded by a west flowing jet and the
side facing the equator has 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,
(28:55):
the first thing we see from the outside contain crystals
of ammonia ice, which look white, 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's maybe it's caused by sunburn like
(29:16):
you mentioned, or maybe by the presence of hydrocarbons. We
don't really know for sure, but it does seem like
the white color of the zones is probably due to
the ammonia ice clouds.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular alcoholic
beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
The jellyfish frat boys, they like the ami ice, the
ami ice and the amy light. Oh but if you're
a jellyfish, you can't open it with your teeth or
your belt buckle, no hard parts anywhere, or how do
you get it open.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
There's going to have to be a whole nother paper
just on this topic.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
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
(30:23):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:09):
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, at least they can
(31:30):
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
(31:54):
the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by
astronomers before eight 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
(32:17):
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
(32:40):
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 two
thousand and eleven, but it was of a storm that
(33:02):
emerged in the 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 a long a latitudinal line
along the northern half of Saturn. I don't know how
else to describe it, as like, you know, somebody took
(33:24):
a kind of milk straw and moved it through the
through the yellow.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
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. But everything with Saturn always feels
kind of serene, and everything with Jupiter feels like intimidating
and a bit chaotic.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Somehow, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, Saturn almost Saturn nine
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 upwelling like this could create
(34:06):
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 kind at the near
(34:26):
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 between two of Jupiter's adjacent
(34:51):
bands becomes unstable, and essentially a jet of wind from
one band pushes up into the normal lattitud tudes 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, and in
(35:12):
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 GRS over time,
(35:37):
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 ninety years I
think one hundred and ninety four years today, is that right?
(36:00):
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 it seems to have
been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear in the near future,
(36:21):
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 2 (36:31):
The big question, Joe is will it still be there
in the year twenty four to one, Because in the
series finale of 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 (36:49):
I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a
good place to hide.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Well, it's the last place you'd think, right.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Oh wait, do they not have cloaking?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Do I do?
Speaker 3 (36:59):
I forget how cloaking works.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Uh, you know there is cloaking, but I don't remember
if the boards 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 (37:11):
Maybe they got to power up, they got to get
some of that red red stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
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,
you know, it's possible that they could make choices purely
for dramatic purposes.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Okay, so red, the red spot, it's it's part of
the queen's pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Well, actually I do have a good answer to that question,
believe it or not. So we don't know if the
red spot will still be there. It seems to be shrinking.
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, or
(37:55):
like the one we have.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Now, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Great red spots come, great Red spots go, But I
don't know if they're ever a good place to park
a space ship.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
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 this 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
(38:29):
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 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,
while we're on Instagram, we are stvym podcast over there.
(38:50):
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We are a weird house on letterboxed and oh yeah,
we have a discord. 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 (39:04):
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 1 (39:26):
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, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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 oriented fashion. But I was looking
(00:41):
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 published in Playboy magazine, and it's
(01:03):
set in the year twenty fifty. It is titled A
Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Oh yeah, huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This
is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it
It is?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, this is a 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,
(01:36):
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 thinks, well,
maybe I'll see it next time.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism
of the story, but this did cause me to think,
with the Great Red sp 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
(02:13):
on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd
just be on land.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, Like I love the shape of Australia. I really
want to visit it somedays so I can appreciate its shape.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
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, winds whipping around you.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So this, this story can be obtained, I've believe in
at 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
(02:59):
had been a tempte 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 (03:17):
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 2 (03:27):
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 (03:38):
It, absolutely aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays
dwelling there.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
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
(04:05):
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 (04:23):
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
(04:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Here.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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 one side of the equatorial stripe. And
(05:12):
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, and these observations more than one
hundred years ago, it was gigantic and it was way
(05:35):
more flattened out.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, definitely look up this eighteen seventy nine photograph if
you have the ability to do so. Let's see. We
also discussed the nature of the storm itself, somewhat an
enormous anticyclone 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
(05:57):
concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet calls Home.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
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
(06:21):
white that is sometimes known as the hollow, and then
inside that you've got the redder or more orange oval.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
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 guess to make, but
it's not true.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
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 2 (06:55):
You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try
and hide it. That's how you know what's inside, and
maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
You get a little peak with the durbble.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
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,
(07:28):
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 observations 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
(07:51):
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 in 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 Lavega at all, and
(08:14):
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
(08:36):
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 that
those changes match up with other changes and looking to
(08:58):
why those changes would in fact impact the colorization. The
paper by Simon at All 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,
(09:22):
they point out, 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 (09:35):
Oh that's interesting. So it seems to be shifting to
the red when the winds are moving faster.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, that's my understanding of it here. But one of
the big things that they drive home is that correlating
the Great Red Spot's color changes with an actual physical
mechanism is really challenging, and so a lot of the
work in these papers seems to really get into that
and come up with various hypotheses as to how this
could be occurring. They point out that drift rate slash
(10:05):
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 in 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 might
(10:27):
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 wash past you, and I
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. But also I have to acknowledge that everything
(10:49):
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? Like? 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
(11:14):
given color, sometimes collectively with other chromophors in general, talking
about in general about 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
(11:37):
high up into the atmosphere these particles are pushed. Now,
one there's a particular NASA JPL scientist who is the
lead author and sometimes I think maybe the 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
(11:59):
Haze by West, Bains, and Friedson. And in 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
(12:20):
the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on 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 biota living organisms. And
(12:41):
the paper that they're citing for this idea was a
nineteen seventy six paper by Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter
who speculated on the possibility of not only life on Jupiter,
but a Jovian ecology.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
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
(13:15):
landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the
atmosphere of Jupiter.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
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
(13:42):
clear that some locals, the Great Red Spot, for example,
may be more favored than others because of higher abundances
of organic molecules prevailing up drafts for other reasons. So yeah,
to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely
held candidate for a play in our solar system where
you could find extraterrestrial life. Like It's not like a
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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 (14:39):
Okay, so getting getting energy from the sun, making its
food that way and then sinking down passively through the atmosphere.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
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
(15:10):
hunts on the floaters, or maybe it's a Manda ray.
You know, you can sort of go wild with the
imagination here.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
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 that's interesting is, you know, this is exactly
(15:41):
the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clark employed in his
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 and
Saltpeter paper here.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, though, of course Clark was quite concerned in anyways
with plausibility. But he's also just trying to tell a
good story.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
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,
(16:28):
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 attention. So
there was one from twenty fourteen. This was an idea
presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, and
(16:49):
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
(17:09):
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,
(17:33):
and laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible.
So the idea here is that we have these chromophores,
these ammonium 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,
(17:54):
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
(18:15):
a sunburn.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
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 2 (18:25):
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 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 which there are red chromophores that are pushed
(18:49):
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
like it's so red eyes, it's 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
than others. But that makes that I do love the
(19:11):
idea that, hey, what if it's read because it's just
full of life? That would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, what if we're looking at algol blooms and certain
bands all on the surface.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
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 (19:36):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:22):
was the same spot and it was there the whole time.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, otherwise people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting,
you know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
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 and go. 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
(20:50):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:32):
and Polytechnic University of Catalonia. And in addition to this paper,
I relied on some explanation and analysis from several articles,
especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and science
communicator Phil Plait 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
(21:55):
structure of Jupiter in 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
(22:15):
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
(22:39):
makes it 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 the smack. Instead,
(23:01):
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
(23:26):
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
(23:48):
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,
(24:09):
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.
(24:31):
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 of 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
(24:51):
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 2 (25:04):
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 we
(25:26):
can live, so Yeah, what do we mean by surface
with a planet anyway?
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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 2 (25:44):
Yeah, Like, how would like balloon based floating organisms judge
life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like
bottom dwellers or something. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
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 white
(26:17):
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 deep within Jupiter itself,
(26:42):
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 hotid rises up through low pressure
areas of the atmosphere all the way up to the top,
(27:05):
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
(27:26):
this extremely fast rotation causes a pronounced Coriolis effect, which
we talked about last time in the context of Earth.
Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more extreme than Earth's because Jupiter
is larger and spinning faster, and this pronounced Coriolis effect
(27:46):
creates powerful jet streams running parallel to Jupiter's equator. These
jet streams form the boundaries 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
(28:10):
is a low pressure area where warm fluid rises up
through the atmosphere and it is 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
(28:32):
back down into the atmosphere, where the side facing the
pole is bounded by a west flowing jet and the
side facing the equator has 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,
(28:55):
the first thing we see from the outside contain crystals
of ammonia ice, which look white, 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's maybe it's caused by sunburn like
(29:16):
you mentioned, or maybe by the presence of hydrocarbons. We
don't really know for sure, but it does seem like
the white color of the zones is probably due to
the ammonia ice clouds.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular alcoholic
beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
The jellyfish frat boys, they like the ami ice, the
ami ice and the amy light. Oh but if you're
a jellyfish, you can't open it with your teeth or
your belt buckle, no hard parts anywhere, or how do
you get it open.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
There's going to have to be a whole nother paper
just on this topic.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
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
(30:23):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:09):
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, at least they can
(31:30):
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
(31:54):
the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by
astronomers before eight 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
(32:17):
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
(32:40):
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 two
thousand and eleven, but it was of a storm that
(33:02):
emerged in the 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 a long a latitudinal line
along the northern half of Saturn. I don't know how
else to describe it, as like, you know, somebody took
(33:24):
a kind of milk straw and moved it through the
through the yellow.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
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. But everything with Saturn always feels
kind of serene, and everything with Jupiter feels like intimidating
and a bit chaotic.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Somehow, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, Saturn almost Saturn nine
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 upwelling like this could create
(34:06):
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 kind at the near
(34:26):
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 between two of Jupiter's adjacent
(34:51):
bands becomes unstable, and essentially a jet of wind from
one band pushes up into the normal lattitud tudes 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, and in
(35:12):
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 GRS over time,
(35:37):
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 ninety years I
think one hundred and ninety four years today, is that right?
(36:00):
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 it seems to have
been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear in the near future,
(36:21):
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 2 (36:31):
The big question, Joe is will it still be there
in the year twenty four to one, Because in the
series finale of 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 (36:49):
I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a
good place to hide.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Well, it's the last place you'd think, right.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Oh wait, do they not have cloaking?
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Do I do?
Speaker 3 (36:59):
I forget how cloaking works.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Uh, you know there is cloaking, but I don't remember
if the boards 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 (37:11):
Maybe they got to power up, they got to get
some of that red red stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
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,
you know, it's possible that they could make choices purely
for dramatic purposes.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Okay, so red, the red spot, it's it's part of
the queen's pomp and circumstance.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Well, actually I do have a good answer to that question,
believe it or not. So we don't know if the
red spot will still be there. It seems to be shrinking.
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, or
(37:55):
like the one we have.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Now, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Great red spots come, great Red spots go, But I
don't know if they're ever a good place to park
a space ship.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
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 this 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
(38:29):
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 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,
while we're on Instagram, we are stvym podcast over there.
(38:50):
We're on a few other social media accounts as well.
We are a weird house on letterboxed and oh yeah,
we have a discord. 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 (39:04):
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 1 (39:26):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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