Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's In Jupiter's Great Red Spot?

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

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Hey, Jorge. sometimes I like to think about what it would be like to get a visit from future scientists who come with like answers to some of our biggest questions. Oh man, you mean like how did the universe form or how big is it or who's going to be president in 2020? Yeah, exactly.

I want to know the answer to those questions and I expect them to have it. But sometimes that makes me kind of nervous. Nervous? Why do you feel nervous? Because then I feel pressure. I imagine like if I went to visit ancient scientists then I'd be on the spot to answer their questions about the universe. Is that like a physics professor's recurring nightmare

going up against a roof of people and not having the answer to something? That's right. I'm talking to Plato and I'm wearing nothing under my toga. Yeah, exactly. But the reason I worry about is that sometimes I feel like we still don't have answers to some of their questions. You mean like simple questions that maybe they had back then, you feel like we still don't even know the answer to them? Yeah, like if you could go talk to Galileo, you know, who looked at the moons of Jupiter.

I'm sure he would have a lot of questions about the solar system. And some of them we have answers to, and some of them are still open questions. That's a bit embarrassing. Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I've heard that there is a big mystery right here in our solar system that is literally staring at us all the time. That's right. And we don't have an answer to. We stare at it, and it stares back.

Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. Where we think about how to answer questions in the universe. Questions in the future, questions in the past, questions from today, questions from tomorrow. Any questions you have about the universe, we are here. to explain the answers to you. That's right.

In this program, we talk about the big questions and the little questions and the big eyesore questions. That's right. We talk about the calm questions and the stormy questions. The red hot burning questions people have. That's right.

But this is not a podcast about Stormy Daniels. No, this is a podcast about other kinds of storms. That's right. Yeah, so to the end of the program, we thought we would tackle a question that was discovered

a long time ago by scientists, but for which we still don't have an answer. That's right. An open question people are still wondering about. We might not get an answer today, might not tomorrow. It might be another hundred years before we figure this one out. Yeah, well, hopefully we'll find the answer

before it shrinks to nothing. That's right. And this one really does harken back to folks like Galileo, who first peered through their telescopes and looked up at the sky and studied Jupiter. And when they looked at Jupiter, they saw something pretty strange.

They saw that Jupiter was staring back at them. That's right. If you've looked through a telescope, then you've noticed that Jupiter has a big spot on it, right? Yeah. But of course, people have been thinking about this and wondering about this for generations. It's not a new question, right? And we received

this question, actually, from one of our younger listeners just the other day. So, to introduce you to today's topic, here's Judah. Hi, my name is Judah. I'm from Los Angeles, Cal California, and I really enjoy listening to your podcast, and I have a question. My question is,

How did Jupiter's eye form? Do other planets have eyes? That's right, the great red spot of Jupiter, one of the most prominent features on any object in the solar system, and we still don't really know what it's all about. that's an interesting way to categorize it it's like the biggest feature ever or right it's like it's like a thing on a thing but it's so big that it's the biggest feature on anything that we know about that's right that makes it it's not even a thing in itself right it's a thing on another thing and it's still huge and it's still a mystery and to give people a sense of the scale you know the the great red spot in jupiter is like one or two times the size of the entire earth right this is not like a little little little detail on some other planet. We're not talking about a rock on the moon or something. We're talking about a huge astronomical feature.

Wow. When do you have you guys do a quick image, Google search for the eye of Jupiter, so you get a sort of a better sense of what we're talking about. That's right. Or if you don't have the internet handy, just use your mind's eye and remember what it looks like. Imagine what Jupiter looks like. It's got all these bands across it, little swirling dots in it.

But then on the southern part of it, the bottom half of it, it's got this big red spot. and imagine that you're an astronomer you're one of the first people to look at Jupiter of course you're going to wonder like what's that right what is that thing what's going on there is that made artificially is it natural how could it be natural what could it be

there's so many questions inspired by this one astronomical feature and the thing that I love about it is that we still don't know that it's still you know staring back at us and resisting all of our efforts to understand it right yeah because it's a it's kind of an eyesore I mean to puns aside

The whole planet is sort of like beige and brown But then it has this ginormous really red Like not a little red But like pretty red giant spot It's not like a huge spot You don't like it You think Jupiter should wear makeup It's like a big Zit on the face of Jupiter

Maybe that's what it is I have Jupiter Maybe Jupiter's a teenager right And it's so embarrassed And it doesn't want to talk about it And now it's mad at you The Zit of Jupiter And one day it's going to pop

And it's going to pop No, I think it's gorgeous. I love the patterns and the swirls. I mean, imagine if Jupiter was just like blank. You know, it was just like one big sort of gray mush. You know, it'd be so boring. I love the texture and the features on Jupiter. It's fascinating because it inspires all these questions

and it's an opportunity to learn. And just aesthetically, I think it looks pretty cool. I think you should have more spots on yourself, Jorge. How do you know I don't? No, but I guess what I mean? It's like a very defined feature. You know what I mean? it's like not a diffuse, you know, like a spot.

It's not like a, you know, like somebody spray painted it and it's fuzzy on the size. It's like a, it has a border and an edge. It's in very sharp relief. You're exactly right. There's real contrast there between the red spot and the stuff immediately next to it, right? So it's definitely its own thing, right? And that raises a lot of questions right there. Wow.

And you're saying it's the size of two earth. It's like you could fit two of our plants. planets in that spot. Yeah. And if you ever wanted to feel small and insignificant, you know, you're tiny compared to our planet and our planet is tiny compared to just features on other planets. You know, not even other planets, just like stuff on those planets. There are pimples in other planets that are bigger than our planet, that's what you're saying.

That's right. I don't know what happened when you pop an earth-sized pimple. Please don't imagine that, folks. But yeah, exactly. But it's amazing to scale, right? Like, just to go across this giant spot would be akin to flying around the world, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

It's huge. And it's sort of got its own, like, patterns, you know? It itself, it rotates around Jupiter. It takes six days to go around Jupiter. The spot itself moves around Jupiter. Wait, what? It moves? Yeah, well, it spins, right?

It rotates. And then the spot itself moves. around Jupiter. Jupiter has all these bands of gas that are flowing in different directions. And this spot goes around Jupiter. It takes about six Earth days to make one transit. So it's not tied to the hard surface of Jupiter. It's like a floating spot. Well, we can get into that, but we don't actually know that much about what's under the red spot and how deep it goes and its connection to what's underneath. A lot of that is a mystery because Jupiter is a hot and wet and nasty place and pretty difficult to study.

Wow. All right, let's get into it. But first, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there knew the answer or thought they had the answer to the question, what's in Jupiter's Red Spot? Yeah, so I walked around the campus of UC Irvine, and I asked them what they knew about Jupiter's Red Spot. So think about it for a second, and think about it. Well, how would you answer a random physics professor stopping you in the middle of the street

asking you, what is in Jupiter's Red Spot? Yeah, would you take out your pepper spray? Would you pull out your taser or would you answer his questions? Would you take out your physics reference book? That's right. That's right. So here's what folks on the UCI campus had to say. What is in the great red spot of Jupiter?

What's going on there? In the great red spot of Jupiter? Oh, something hot. You say it's nasty and wet? No. But definitely hot. Yeah. I have no idea.

Okay. Probably some like plasma. reactions, I don't know, something, something at, like, high temperature and, like, high pressure. Okay. But... Isn't it a tornado of some sorts? Like a huge tornado? Yeah.

A very big one. Okay. No, I don't. No? Okay. No, I haven't looked into that. Okay. I think I've heard some things about how there's storms going on in there that might be causing

that. It's like a storm of some sort, right? Like a never-ending storm, or as far as we know, because it's been there for a very long time. Mm-hmm. And I think that's all I know. I mean, I'm not quite sure what that refers to, but it might just be like, I know that there are large dust storms on Jupiter that might be to what you're referring. If I understand the question correctly, it might be something like a gigantic supercell that's been raging for many years on Jupiter and will rage for many years in the future. All right. Some not-safe-for-work answer is here.

Let's just say there's a broad variety of responses, yeah. Nobody said pimple, though. Nobody called the Zit on the face of Jupiter. I think your theory is in trouble there, man. But, no, I mean, some people said it was something hot. I wonder what they were thinking. Yeah, and another common theme is people thinking of it as a storm, like a dust storm, right? I think they're imagining there like the red sand on Mars or something like that.

But a storm is on the right track, right? It's definitely a huge swirling mass of gas like a hurricane, right? Very high winds. And so a storm is not a terrible answer. A storm is a pretty good way to describe it. Okay. So there's a general understanding out there that it's kind of like a weather phenomenon or it's swirling. It's not like a, it's not that the rock is painted red under there.

That's right. Yeah. It's not a huge piece of art on the surface of Jupiter or anything. It's, I think people are familiar with the fact that Jupiter is a gas planet, right? So we're not looking at the surface in the same way that we look at the surface of Mars when we look at Jupiter. There isn't the surface there for us to see. We're looking at sort of the top of the Joviian atmosphere. year. And what we're seeing is a big swirling mass. And so I think it's, uh, thinking of it as weather is

a good way to think about it. All right. So let's, uh, let's start with some basics. Well, let's talk about Jupiter and what that planet is like. Yeah. So let's start from the inside out, right? So, and compare it to Earth. Earth, as we know, is like a big rocky ball with hot nasty stuff on the inside and then a very thin atmosphere surrounding it. Jupiter is really pretty different. It has a rocky, icy core, we think, but it's pretty small, and it's mostly a huge ball of hydrogen. And the hydrogen is under such pressure from all the gravity, from Jupiter being so massive, that the hydrogen's not like the hydrogen you imagine, like a big tank of gas or something. Most of Jupiter is this huge ball of metallic hydrogen, right? Hydrogen that's been squeezed and so much that it's turned

into a metal. And then on top of that, you have a liquid hydrogen ocean, right? And this is not something you ever want to put a swimsuit on and dive into. It'd be a little chilly. No, I think it'd be really hot, actually. I think it's liquid and it's under high pressure and temperature. So it's a pretty crazy place to be. Wow. But not nasty and wet.

That's subjective. So I'll defer that to the first person to actually swim in the oceans of Jupiter. And then on top of that liquid ocean, you have gaseous hydrogen. You have just like hydrogen that we're more familiar with. And then on top of that, you have. clouds that are like maybe 30 miles deep. So it's like a layered cake of different flavors of hydrogen. Like the more compressed it gets, it actually first turns liquid and then it actually

turns into like solid hydrogen. Is that what you were saying? It actually forms like a solid hydrogen, like a block of hydrogen? Wow. Not exactly. It is metallic, but it's probably still liquid. It's not so much pressure that it becomes a solid. Yeah, layer cake is a good example because the stuff on the bottom gets squeezed by all

this stuff on the top. So this is a layer cake with like a gazillion tons of frosting. So the bottom layer has become like squished. It's no longer fluffy at all, right? As Paul from the British baking show would say, it's like it's underbaked. But then how big is that solid

core in the middle? Like is it still pretty big or is it bigger than the Earth? It's a little bit bigger than the Earth. It's about the same scale as the Earth. The biggest fraction of Jupiter is definitely that metallic hydrogen part. Oh, wow. So really, at the core, Jupiter is kind of like about the size of Earth. It just has a lot of icing on it.

Exactly. Yeah. Millions of Earth's worth of icing, exactly. That is a huge tub of icing of cosmic galactic icing. Exactly. But the surface, the very surface that we see, that's all clouds. Yeah. And I wouldn't even call it a surface. You know, we're seeing the tops of the clouds. And it's not a surface because you can't land on it. You know, you could descend into it. And we once did drop a probe into Jupiter, but it got melted and crushed before it even got down through the cloud layer.

Oh, wow. Just from the craziness of those clouds. Yeah. Even just those clouds are very high temperature and pressure. Oh, wow. But that cloud layer, you're telling me, is about 30 miles deep. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of clouds.

I mean, Jupiter is just massive on this scale. It's even hard to imagine. like when you think about planets. And so it's a huge pile of clouds. There's a lot of stuff going on there. And, you know, when you think about weather, right, weather is something that happens in the atmosphere, right? Because you have these gas moving around, interacting.

And 30 miles deep of clouds means you can have lots and lots of layers. You know, here on Earth we have like weather in the upper atmosphere, in the lower atmosphere, right? Jupiter has so much more atmosphere in clouds than we do, that there could be complexities there that we've never seen, that we've never imagined. And that's one of the fascinating things about stuff. studying Jupiter is it might give us a clue

as to like bigger questions about weather or what weather might be like on exoplanets and other solar systems. We hope to one day have our children live on. So it's a pretty important place to study how these things work. Yeah, because our only experience of weather is here on Earth.

And if you think about it, we just have this tiny little layer of gas to understand how all these things swirl around and how they get affected by the sun and the Earth's spinning, right? We have a very small sample to understand weather. Exactly. And so that's why they send satellites up to study the atmosphere of Jupiter and the weather inside Jupiter.

And, you know, even to storm aside, even if Jupiter didn't have the great red spot, it would already be a place of crazy weather. Like there are lightning strikes on Jupiter that are more than a thousand times larger, like more energetic than lightning strikes on Earth. You know, imagine like a thousand lightning strikes simultaneously all in the same place. That's like everyday occurrence on Jupiter. You mean like a single bolt of lightning in Jupiter is about a thousand times more powerful in a lightning strike on Earth? Yeah, exactly. It's like everything on Jupiter is more dramatic, you know? I bet birthday parties in Jupiter are much more impressive than birthday parties on Earth.

Well, apparently Zits are also very much more impressive. I bet their jokes are funny. You know, they're probably much more jovial. Okay, so things are more extreme because it's... It's so much atmosphere, so thicker, so much thicker, hotter and crazier. And so that's kind of the picture of Jupiter. It's like a little tiny rock core about the size of our planet. But then you have all of this hydrogen swirling around, swishing around.

That's mostly what the planet is. It's like a giant gas container swirling around. Yeah, exactly. And remember that most of the stuff in the solar system is hydrogen, because that's the simplest element. It's most of the stuff in the universe. for the same reason. It's just a proton with electron around it. The sun is mostly hydrogen for that same reason. So Jupiter is mostly hydrogen. It's just, most of the stuff around, the basic building block was hydrogen. So that's why it's hydrogen. And Jupiter is sort of like a star that never

got started burning, which is why I can't fuse to make heavier stuff. But the thing that's interesting to me is that, you know how we have weather patterns on Earth? Like we have the jet stream and these various winds that are sort of basically stable. The same kind of stuff happens on Jupiter. And you can see it with your own eyes. If you look at the surface of Jupiter, you see these bands, right? Like Jupiter's not just one big blob. It has these bands on it. And these bands are basically just like wind patterns.

And they go one way or they go the other way. There's like these, you know, centuries-long, stable weather patterns on the surface of Jupiter. That's really pretty fascinating. Wow. Because the whole thing is rotating, right? Like it's not just a ball floating out in space. It's spinning as well, isn't it? Yeah, exactly.

It's definitely spinning. And something we don't know very well is, like, how are the various parts spinning? You know, the atmosphere is spinning, the ocean is spinning, the core underneath it is spinning. We have a sense for what's in there from various gravitational measurements, but we've never gone in there, so it's hard to measure how fast these things are moving. We have some clues from, like, the magnetic field information, but so one thing we don't

know is how fast these things are rotating relative to each other. You know, like we talked once about one of these moons, could have an outer ice shell that's rotating faster than the inner core under the ocean. The same thing could be happening in Jupiter. So there's a lot we don't know about what's going on inside Jupiter. Inside, huh. Like if you just measured how the clouds moved on Earth, you might get a totally different idea of how the Earth is actually rotating.

Yeah, although Earth is not covered in clouds the way Jupiter is, so you can actually see the surface and you can measure, you can spot something on the surface of the Earth and watch it go by every 24 hours. You can't do that on Jupiter, right? You can't see the core of Jupiter or this liquid ocean. Like I said, we dropped some probes in, but they didn't even make it all the way down before they got like melted and crushed

and Jupiter just like laughs away our pathetic attempts to study it. Swatted it away like a flower. Yeah, exactly. And so the most interesting feature on the surface of Jupiter, of course, is this great red spot, right? And by now we've studied it fairly extensively.

You can see it from telescopes on Earth and we've sent a whole series of probes that go by Jupiter, Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, Galileo, and most recently the Juno probe and they've taken really amazing pictures of this so you can tell that the Great Red Spot is basically a huge storm.

Wow. Let's jump right into the eye of the storm. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toy, Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is, back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to

predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's Back to School Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants.

wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers.

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All right, so Jupiter is just a, basically a giant ball of hydrogen in all kinds of states, solid, liquid, gas, clouds. And the eye of Jupiter, you're saying, it's just basically like a storm inside of that giant weather ball. Yeah, exactly. It's basically a huge hurricane. And, you know, on Earth, you can have big hurricanes that are hundreds of months. miles wide. That's a pretty amazing event. It's pretty rare. And you can get wind speeds up to, you know, 100, 150 sometimes in super rare events up to like 200 miles an hour. Well, the great red spot has winds that go up to 400 miles per hour. And it's been going on for, you know, we don't know exactly how long, but much more than 100 years. Well, wait, you mean it hasn't always been there.

There was a time when you could look at Jupiter and you wouldn't see a red spot. Well, this is actually fascinating because we don't really have reliable information. The earliest solid observation of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter comes from like the 1830s. Before that, there are some folks, Galileo, and those guys who wrote about Jupiter and said, oh, I see a spot on Jupiter. But they weren't like really very detailed observations. They didn't like tell us exactly what they saw and measured it and stuff. And there are some hints in those writings that suggest they might. have seen a different spot like on the northern side of jupiter so it might be that jupiter's red spot

is like a couple hundred years old or it could be that it's been there for thousands of years we just don't have like a lot of data right is it a birthmark or is it something that happened in purity you know anything like it could be that we go back to talk to galileo or folks like that and they don't even have this question because they've never seen the great red spot in jupiter and they're like what What are you talking about? Or it could be that this has been around for thousands of years, and it's a big question in their minds as well. So it's sort of cool that we don't know if this is like a transient thing that exists only

in these few decades and hundreds of years that we're looking at Jupiter or if it's a prominent feature. That's a cool thing about thinking about that sort of time scales of the solar system. You know, like in a million years, will Saturn still have rings? Will Jupiter be identifiable? You know, this kind of thing. But that's like their signature move, you know? It's in their logo, you know?

Exactly. Well, if you're like a teenager who had a lot of acne, that might have been your signature, but then you kind of want to grow out of it and not, you don't want to be called like, hey, remember you? I remember you. You were that kid who had all that acne, right? You want to leave it behind. So maybe Jupiter feels the same way. Well, I think it's interesting to me that it's, you call it a storm. It's a storm because the whole planet is basically just a giant cloud weather system. What makes it sort of a contain, what makes something a storm in a planet where basically the whole planet where basically the whole planet is basically the whole cloud weather system. What makes it sort of a contain, what makes something a storm in a planet where basically the whole. whole thing is kind of a storm. This description hasn't made you want to, like, vacation to Jupiter or something. There's no calm days on Jupiter. Yeah, that's a great question. I think the thing that makes it a storm is that it's separate from the rest of the cloud system.

It's, like, self-contained. It eats, first of all, it eats other storms. We've seen, like, smaller puny-sized storms, storms, like the size of huge hurricanes on Earth. This storm just, like, rolls over them and gobbles them up. What? It's like a system. It's got its own energy.

Is that what it means? It has its own kind of like, you know, perpetual kind of machine cycle, something going on. It's kind of like a bully. I don't know. It just like sucks up the lunch money from other storms, right? And, yeah, so it eats other storms. It's self-contained and it's separate. There's a boundary there, right?

You can see these pictures from Juno. They're incredible. And there's the winds that are circling. And there's an edge to it after which, you get these cloud bands, and they're definitely different. So it's separate from the rest of Jupiter. And I would say that the other thing that makes it a storm is that the winds are faster. Like the winds there, 400 miles per hour, are definitely faster than they are in the rest of Jupiter.

So it's the stormiest spot on Jupiter. If you were going to vacation at Jupiter, I wouldn't recommend the great red spot. Unless you like sailing. Unless you like that kind of thing. Exactly. Wind surfing, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. If you're super good.

The ultimate wind surfing. Yeah, exactly. And you were asking earlier about, like, is it connected to something underneath? And that's a really good question. We just don't know the answer. We've probed it a little bit using various techniques, and we know that it goes like 100, 150 miles down. So it definitely penetrates down all the way through the cloud layer and into the blob of gaseous hydrogen. But we don't know if it's connected to something else going on.

Like, is it an indication that there's some, like, tectonic activity inside? Jupiter that's venting out some heat that's fueling this thing, or is it just a crazy weather pattern that happens to support itself? The ideas are pretty broad still, which really still pretty clueless. So it could be just something that floats, basically, or it could be something that is kind of connected to the rocky center of Jupiter. Yeah, exactly. The way like storms on Earth, right, they get their energy usually from the ocean, right? There's water and the heat from the ocean. And that's why, for example, global warming makes, on average, larger hurricanes because warmer water fuels these storms. And then the storms sort of peter out when they run into land

because they can no longer get fuel because they're not over the ocean anymore. I see. You don't get hurricanes in the middle of Africa, either or the middle of the U.S. You only get them sort of in the, you know, the Caribbean or in the middle of the Atlantic, right? That's right. And that's why they tend to lose power when they hit land, right? They're most ferocious just when they hit the beaches and then they sort of peter out as they go further and further inland. Thank gosh. But, you know, we don't know. Maybe in the future with climate change, hurricanes are just going to rule the world, we don't know. But there's no surface like that to slow down storms on Jupiter. So we don't know what's fueling it. Is there some like hot spot in the liquid ocean,

liquid hydrogen ocean that's connected to something? We don't know if it's just floating there. Yeah, it's a great question. But what do you mean it? It needs energy to keep going, and you're saying we don't know where that energy is coming from? Yeah, exactly. They've done some thermal imaging, so they know that the center of it seems to be warmer than the rest of it, but they don't know if that's just some warm spot on Jupiter or if that's coming from underneath, right? If it's like drawing energy from inside Jupiter, or maybe there's some alien civilization there that's pumping out some heat signature from its fusion reactor. I mean, that's crazy

speculation, but I'm sure somebody has written that science fiction novel. Oh. I was thinking that would make a cool title for a book, The Eye of Jupiter. I'm sure. I'm sure somebody has written that book already. Oh, oh, man. Sorry. Every book

you reimagine somebody has ever written. You know, one time in this podcast, I had an idea for a science fiction story and I speculated about it. And then somebody sent me an email saying, oh, that story's been written. Here it is. So I'm pretty sure we're not coming up with any new ideas on this podcast for science fiction stories. That story has been written.

I just wrote it after I heard your podcast. Here he is. And I'm suing you. We're talking about it without giving me credit. I think that means we've made it, Daniel. We have fan fiction now based on the podcast. That's right. Jorge versus the banana.

I'm going to read that fan fiction. Somebody out there write that story. The eye of the banana. The eye of the banana. Yeah, so I think it's amazing that we just don't know, like, what caused this, you know? Is this something that was created by some crazy event? You know, like did something hit Jupiter and impact a bunch of energy and cause a storm? Because, you know, we've seen stuff hit Jupiter, right?

Like back in the 90s, a huge comet broke up and hit Jupiter. And it left some spots on the surface of Jupiter, but they didn't last, right? Those are gone by now. Right. But this is like a self-contained, ongoing, almost independent phenomenon that's happening on the big clouds of Jupiter, right? Yeah, exactly. And we know it's been around for at least 150 years, but it's not static, right? It's not unchanging. We've been watching it now pretty carefully for a few decades, and we see it changing. The weird thing is it seems to be shrinking, and it's going from, like, more oval to more circular. That kind of blew my mind here that it's not a permanent feature of Jupiter. It might be like a transient, temporary thing that just pops in and out. Yeah, it could be that you tell your kids about this eye on Jupiter, and they're like, whatever, Dad, that's a crazy story.

Jupiter doesn't have an eye on it, you know? Whatever. We know it was aliens. Future Daniel told us. Future Daniel. I have a lot of questions for future Daniel. Yeah, I got some numbers here. Back in 1979, we measured it to be about 15.5,000 miles wide.

And now it's just under 8,000 miles wide. Oh, man. And, yeah. So it's a lot smaller than it used to be. Like, your grandpa's great red spot is much more. more impressive than yours. And that's not just your grandpa talking. That's real.

Like, that's data. In my days, the eye Jupiter was much bigger. We had a bigger mystery than you guys. Yeah, it's going to be downgraded from the great red spot to the pretty big red spot down to the red spot. Maybe it's just very slowly blinking. You know, I was thinking that also. It is shrinking. That doesn't mean necessarily it's going to disappear.

It could go down and then it could come back up, right? We have no idea what's causing. this thing, what the dynamics are, where the mechanism is. So we can't really predict anything about it, right? And it's not like it's moving steadily. It was shrinking steadily, but then between 2012 and 2014, it shrunk really dramatically for a while. We have no idea what happened there.

Let's see what happened in 2012. Barack Obama got reelected. Thanks, Obama. It's a direct correlation here. Exactly. Exactly. A bunch of terrible movies came out. Yeah, that's probably it also. Yeah.

All right, well, let's get into the biggest question about the big red spot. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is Back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school.

a week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship.

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All right, Daniel, here's the biggest question I have about the big red spot in Jupiter, which is, why is it red? I know. I wish I knew the answer to that question. Nobody knows is the short answer, right? We still don't know what makes it red. And it's not like a tiny bit red. This is not one of those things that astronomers are exaggerating and you check it out for yourself. And you're like, well, that's not so impressive. really red. Right. Because the rest of the planet is like beige, brown, pretty boring colors. Man, you are so critical of the aesthetics of Jupiter, man. Come on. Jupiter is beautiful. Jupiter, I love you. I think you're amazing. No, I'm praising its bold choice of this red. Because, you know, it's like, you know, it painted the walls beige, but then it painted a giant red dot in the middle of the living room. Yeah, we don't know what makes it red. It's fascinating, right? And it

It seemed like it might not be that hard to figure out. So scientists like said, oh, maybe it's ammonium-hyde sulfate, or it's this other chemical or it's that chemical. And so they try to reproduce it, like reproduce the conditions of Jupiter in the lab and see if they could make it glow red the same way, but they couldn't. Some of the current ideas are like cosmic rays or coming down and irradiating it and making it glow red. But people have tried that in the lab also, and they just can't get it to glow the right color of red.

I feel like you just took it up a notch in the mystery scale. Not only do we not know what is Jupiter's red spot. We don't even know why it's red. I know. It might not even be red. It's definitely red. But yeah, why is it red not like purple or blue or orange or something, right? What's going on?

And the redness is so tantalizing because, you know, red really catches your eye. So it's not like it's a beige spot on top of a white planet or something. We just don't understand it. It's so bright and dramatic, right? It's a very, very red spot. And so something is going on there. And it's of interest to, you know, atmospheric physicists and scientists and weather scientists and that kind of stuff. Because it gives us a clue.

It's like how these storms form and what's going on inside them. It seems like a really big clue. And I know, Daniel, that you can't resist a big red button if you see one. Does this sort of tantalize you? It makes you want to go to Jupiter and press that big red button? I do want to go to Jupiter. Yes, I would love to go visit the great red spot. Thank you very much for offering.

to fund my travel. I appreciate that. It's quite a quiet invitation there. You just go and I'll send you the check when you get there. It just charge you to IHeartMedia. I think they're funding this operation. They like eyes, so they may... That's right. This Jovian trip to the Eye of Jupiter

brought to you by IHeartMedia. I would definitely go and love to see it. And yeah, red attracts me. You know, I sit in the control room with a large Hadron Collider with that big red cancel the collider button. And yes, I want to press it. And I'm tempted to press it.

And so in the same way, I want to go see what's going on. It seems like it's calling to us. Obviously, it's not. Maybe not so obviously. But it seems like it's calling to us. And I think it's fun that scientists want to figure this out and that they can't. And, you know, it's not just curiosity. We're going to be looking at the atmospheres of lots of other planets pretty soon.

We have these amazing telescopes now, like tests and other telescopes coming online. that we'll be able to image the atmospheres of exoplanets. That means taking pictures of planets and other solar systems. And then we're going to have questions. We're going to be like, what's going on there? Can we live there? Is there water in that atmosphere? You know, and the best way to figure out how to do that

is to practice by looking at this stuff nearby. Wow. It's kind of like those weather cams, you know, where they show you what the weather is like in Palm Beach or Santa Barbara. Or on the top of the mountain, right? You see how much snow there is. whether it's cloudy. You can be like, hey, that planet looks pretty good.

Let's go over there. Exactly. And it's the kind of thing you want to get right because you don't want to fly all the way over there, spend 20 years and be like, oh, whoops. Turns out this is a huge storm and not a nice beach planet. So you definitely want to get this kind of thing right. We want to understand weather systems on other planets.

That would be very helpful. What is it called? Exaweather or? Astro weather, astro meteorology, maybe? Astrology. Astroclamatology. Astroclimatology. I love that. Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, as the Earth heats up and our weather gets more and more extreme, it may be helpful to see what weather patterns are like on other planets as our weather gets more and more like theirs. Oh, man. Yeah. If we eat the wrong things, we could get a big giant Zid also. That's right. Here again, you're blaming Jupiter's choices. See, you're very judgmental about Jupiter in this podcast.

Jupiter, we love you the way you are. You make your choices, you know, that's fine. I think Jupiter should be very planet positive about itself. Even though it is big and round, or because it's big and round. There really aren't a lot of options. You don't want to be a slender planet, no, that's for sure. It does have a lot of gas, that's true. Wouldn't it be awesome if Jupiter got like a second eye?

And then that would really be weird. Oh, man. It's like, it's looking at us. And you're saying that's the amazing thing. It could happen because we don't know. it caused the first one, so it could just generate a second eye. Yeah, and that kind of thing does happen. Like, not on the scale of the great red spot, but recently there was a sort of a smaller

white spot that formed on the top side of the planet. It lasted several years and then dissipated. And so we don't know if, like, they just have to get big enough and then they're stable or if there's something fueling it underneath. We really don't know. I would love to watch Jupiter in sort of time-lapse footage over like a million years, right, to see how these things evolve. Because remember, we have to think about these things on longer timescales, right?

What we're looking at is like a slow motion video of gas bouncing around, of swirling vapors, you know, on the longer timescales, this could just be a blip or it could be something that's going to eventually grow and take over Jupiter, right? Wow. It could have had more eyes in the past, right? Yeah, exactly. It could have had more eyes as far as we know. Well, it's pretty cool to think about the idea that we have all these,

mysteries right here in our backyard that we have no idea about and that we may never know. I mean, I could disappear before we get the answer. Exactly. Our solar system is so full of fascinating mysteries. You know, we're tempted to look out in the grander scale and think about the history, the universe, and how big is it, and is it accelerating, and what is dark energy and all that stuff. But we have a lot of mysteries in our backyard, you know?

Why does Mars not have a magnetic field? Why is Jupiter so crazy, right? What happened to Neptune? What's going on in the moons of Jupiter? Like, there's so many things right here that we don't know the answer to. And those questions are more fascinating because we're much more likely to figure them out. You know, we can go visit Jupiter. It's not that big a deal.

We can send probes to land on these moons. Eventually, we can go visit the Great Red Spot. Like, these questions we probably will get answers to, and that makes the questions themselves, to me, much more exciting. Yeah, better go before it blinks. That's right. before somebody pops that zit. All right, well, thank you for joining us.

That's been our podcast for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. that's one word, or email us at

Feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily,

it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure. And, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event.

To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, and IHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. This is an IHeart podcast.