Instant Genius - Jupiter in opposition, with Dr Jonathan Nichols

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

On Monday 26 September, Jupiter will make its closest approach to Earth for 59 years, giving astronomers and stargazers a unique opportunity to observe and study the planet. To mark this moment, we spoke to planetary scientist Dr Jonathan Nichols from Leicester University, to understand the significance of this cosmological event and find out how new research is rewriting what we know about the enigmatic giant in our midst. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today we're talking about Jupiter in opposition, which is essentially the best time of year to go outside and see the godfather of the solar system with your very own eyes, and some help from a pair of binoculars. I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Nichols, an associate professor at the University of Leicester, who studies Jupiter's auroras. He does this primarily using the Hubble Telescope and data from the Juno spacecraft. And more recently, he was involved in putting together

the first stunning images of Jupiter produced by the James Webb Telescope. He's here to explain exactly what Jupiter being in opposition means, why it's significant for astronomers and stargazers, and he's going to explain all the incredible new science coming out of the various missions studying Jupiter right now. So the reason why the excuse I've found to chat today is people might have seen in the news that Jupiter

will be in what's said to be, will be in opposition on Monday. So can you explain to listeners what that means and why it's significant? Yeah, well they might have seen Jupiter in more than just the news. they might have actually seen it in the sky if it's been clear where they are. And the reason is that opposition is one of the best times to observe the planets. What it means is that Jupiter or any planet that's in opposition

is on the opposite side of the earth to the sun. So from our vantage point on the earth, what we're seeing is a disk of the planet that's fully illuminated by the sun. You can see the whole circular disk of the planet. And that means that we're getting the most light back from the planet to us. So it appears very bright in the sky. But there's a second effect, which is that that's the time when the planet is closest to the Earth. So not only is it reflecting from the whole of the disk, the planet is actually as close as it's going to get, really.

So that means that it appears very large in the sky as well. And so that means that, for example, Jupiter is really quite bright at the moment. In fact, my dad was sitting in his armchair the other day, and he pointed out this very bright light in the sky, and he wanted to know what it was. And, of course, it's Jupiter, which is one of the brightest objects in the sky when it's opposition. So maybe people who even aren't into astronomy

are noticing this object in the sky. And it's a really good opportunity for getting people interested in what's in the heavens and learn a little bit about planets. So it's important for the wider community as well as astronomers. It reminds me of my mum who I remember a couple years back, said that she could, well, maybe more than a couple years, but said that she could see Jupiter. And I was like, wait, are you okay, mum?

And then I realized you'd been listening to the radio and told her that, you know, she was in our position and, oh, at least it was very bright in the sky that night. And it is funny when your family sort of bring up your own interest back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite startling because it really can be quite bright. And that along with Venus, I think often leads people to wonder what's up in the sky. But it's not just of passing interest. It's actually the best time for professional astronomers to look at planets as well. because they fill up more of the telescopes field of view.

So you get a better resolution on the planet, as well as it being brightest. You're collecting as many photons as you're going to collect. It also gives you a nice, big, very highly resolved image of the planet. So it is actually very important. And when we're scheduling observations with big telescopes, like, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope or Keck or any of these, these big professional observatories, we tend to try and cluster them as near to opposition

as we can for that reason. Now, obviously, it's not always possible for us to do that. In fact, if you're wanting to observe the planet when Juno is orbiting and it's a certain position, you might not always be able to observe opposition and you sort of have to take the fact that your view isn't going to be as good. But if you do happen to be observing at this time, when you can make it, then that's the time when the world telescopes tend to be trained on Jupiter. And how often does Jupiter get into this position?

It's a yearly event. It changes slightly every year, but it's effectively when the Earth, Jupiter and the Sun are all in a line. And of course, as the Earth orbits the Sun, that occurs once a year. but as Jupiter is also orbiting the sun at a slower rate than the Earth is, that tends to slip every year. So it gets later and later every year. But at the moment, of course, it's around about this time, and it's a great time to look up and see Jupiter in the sky. Not least because the skies are getting darker again, you know, as we're entering the winter period when the skies are getting darker earlier, not only is Jupiter shining brightly, but also the skies are darker in general.

So it really is a good time to get outside and look at Jupiter. And I'd also recommend people taking the binoculars out and looking at Jupiter, because not only is the disk, you know, the disk of Jupiter shining very brightly, but if you get a pair of binoculars, any normal pair of binoculars of who you don't need an astronomical telescope, point it up at Jupiter. and you'll be able to see four faint pinpricks of light surrounding Jupiter. And it's fun to look at Jupiter over the next few days and see these points of light changing position.

And those are the four Galilean moons, so-called after Galileo, Galileo, who discovered them using his telescope. He was the first person to point a telescope up at Jupiter and discover these objects. and it has extremely prominent importance in terms of discovering the fact the Earth is not the center of the universe, etc, etc. So it's very important historically from an astronomy perspective, but also it's just fun to do. Yeah, and we've got some instructions on how you can find Jupiter on the site, but it's really easy now with those night sky apps, right? that you can just point them upwards, figure out where it is,

then point your binoculars in the same direction. Yeah, yeah, and it will tell you which moon it is that you're looking at. And it's also fun to see how those different moons change at different rates. So I.O., the innermost Galilean moon, is orbiting really quickly, and it zips around Jupiter, and its position changes very quickly, whereas the other ones move slower as they move out from Jupiter. Now, obviously, from our viewpoint, the pin-pins. prick of light that's closest to Jupiter isn't necessarily I.

It could be just our viewpoint, but the way to determine that is you either look on your app and find out what it was. But perhaps a more fun way of finding out is to time how long it takes for it to move around and see which one is moving quickest. Okay. And so Jupiter was also in the news recently when the James Webb Space Tadiscape gave us an incredible new view of the planet. And it's a Aurora's, which you study. Now, I hadn't realized that, you know, until the announcement was made, that Leicester University was going to be kind of quite heavily involved in the production of that image. I just wondered what that was like to kind of, I suppose, see what you study and resolve

it in a kind of new light. Yeah, well, Leicester's been involved with James Webb all the way through. We constructed part of one of the instruments. This particular set of observations is really a test to find out whether we can actually point James Webb at Jupiter. James Webb is an incredibly complex observatory, but it's a challenge to observe something like Jupiter, which is very big, it's very bright, it's moving, it's rotating. It's not an easy object to study, especially if you've got an instrument

which is really designed to be looking at the faintest objects in the universe to point it to. at something big and bright and bulky like Jupiter is not so easy. So these were a test to see if we could observe Jupiter with instruments with exquisite sensitivity, tiny fields of view. And it wasn't obvious as to whether it was going to work. And it worked, I think, far better than anybody actually was daring to believe. I remember when these images were made available on the,

on the server, the NASA server where these images get stored, I was at a conference called the magnetospheres of the outer planets where we specifically look at the auroras and Jupiter and think about it in great detail. And it was amazing because we didn't know whether we'd actually be able to see it at all. So we put these images up on the display in the conference and there was a great big cheer that went up. So it was fantastic to see and it's really good to see that actually, you know,

we can do it. And we're going to get great science. I mean, that's the thing. Okay. So the science that you get out of James Webb is that you can see the auroras, but you can also tie that into the dynamics of what's going on in the atmosphere. So we can figure out how energy is being transported from the very high regions where the auroras are produced down into the lower atmosphere. We can look at the composition of the gases in the lower atmosphere using different. different spectral regions, you know, different wavelengths. And you can produce these spectral maps of Jupiter's atmosphere that reveal this 3D flow of energy from the upper atmosphere down to the deep churning cloud decks. And so it's really exciting. It's really cool, Jupiter science,

but also it's what's the appetite for what we can do when we look at the other planets. Now, you know, there's observations of Neptune just being released. There's going to be other planets. well, I believe Uranus. And also it provides an in-depth view as to what maybe planets orbiting around other stars might look like. So I suppose it's probably a good point to now just dive into Aurora for a little bit. So could you just explain, just in, you know, in case people don't quite know what they are. We're talking, you know, on Earth, we're talking about the northern lights. We know what they look like and they feel like. But what are, what creates Aurora and what What are we interested in them about them when we look at other planets and their aurora?

So aurora or the northern lights are glows in the atmosphere that are caused when charged particles in the space surrounding the planet are caused to funnel down the planet's magnetic field and they strike the atmosphere. And when they hit the atmosphere, they excite the particles in the atmosphere. and those particles release that energy through the emission of light. And so these auroras that if we can get to see them on the Earth, are really quite spectacular. But they're actually very useful because they tell us about the energetic processes

that are occurring in the planet's magnetic field that have caused these particles to be fired down towards the Earth's atmosphere. And those energetic processes have important implications for, for example, the health of any astronauts in space. Many satellites are right in the danger zone for where the radiation environment of the Earth, which is related to these kind of processes, gets really intense.

And so we need to understand how these processes work and how we can maybe engineer our satellites to not be exposed to the dangers of this kind of radiation environment. But it also affects things like radio communications and GPS signals and, Anytime you watch the television or use your phone to figure out where you are, you're using signals that are bouncing from satellites and they're passing through the ionosphere, which is very region of the atmosphere that's affected by these things and that's where the auroras shine.

But also, you know, it's affected by these processes going on further up in space. So from a terrestrial perspective, it's really important. But from what's going on at the other planets, well, the other planets, provide natural laboratories to study these processes in a very different environment. So the Earth is one data point, as it were. The other planets provide a way of looking at these processes in very different environment. So it provides a full picture of how space plasmas, space weather behaves in different planets. And in Jupiter's case, it's a very extreme environment.

You know, it's the biggest magnetic field, the most powerful magnetic field, the strongest. It's on a planet that's the biggest. It's rotating fastest. The energy comes from a completely different source. The energy is not from the sun, which is the energy source that ultimately drives the Earth's auroras. The energy for Jupiter is primarily the rotation of the planet, coupled with the existence of the volcanic moon Io. So it tells us how planets behave when they're driven in a completely different way. But not only that, it provides a window into studying more distant astrophysical objects that we can't get to.

We can't send a spacecraft to an exoplanet or a brown dwarf or a white dwarf or something that's got a magnetic field that's rotating very quickly. So it gives us insight into how those kind of bodies behave. You talked there about what generates the aurora on Jupiter. the magnetosphere, is that generated in the same way that our magnetosphere is in here or not? Yeah, so a magnetosphere is the region of space which contains and is controlled by the planet's magnetic field. So if the planet has a global magnetic field, it will have a magnetosphere surrounding it. And the magnetosphere is effectively the cavity that's carved out in the solar wind. The solar wind is flowing past all the planets at a million miles an hour.

most of the solar wind tends to be diverted around the outside. So you've got this magnetic bubble that's protecting the planet. Now, some of that energy actually does get, and plasma particles do get in and produce the processes that drive the auroras. But mostly you've got this magnetic bubble which contains plasma that is associated with the planet. Now, so Jupiter has an extremely powerful internal magnetic field. It's the largest in the solar system, and it produces a magnetosphere that is actually in the shortest dimension. It's five times bigger than the sun. So that's the largest coherent structure within the solar system, apart from the sun's magnetic field itself. And that, if you imagine, Jupiter is roughly,

on average, five times the distance of the sun from the Earth. That's where it orbits in the solar system. So if you could see Jupiter's magnetosphere in the sky, it would appear as large as the sun or the moon in the sky. So that just gives you an idea as to how big Jupiter's magnetic field is. And it actually extends probably further than the orbit of Saturn. This is a big, big structure in the solar system. And not only that, then, it produces the most powerful auroras. Jupiter's auroras shine probably over a thousand times brighter than the Earth's do. And the radio emissions that are associated with Jupiter are also extremely bright. If you were to look at Jupiter in the radio,

you see an object that is as bright as the quiet sun. You know, when the sun isn't bursty and it is fairly quiet, you know, Jupiter can shine as bright as the sun. And its radio emissions look very different as well. So that leads you on to think about, well, what can we do to a Jupiter-like planet to make it even brighter so that we can possibly observe it from the other side of, you know, or not the other side of the galaxy, but certainly, you know, interstellar distances, close interstellar distances.

So, you know, Jupiter is the link between Earth and the rest of the cosmos. So with that magnetosphere, so am I right in saying it's a molten core at the centre that's creating this magnetic field? So to produce an internal magnetic field in a planet, you need a couple of things. You need a conducting fluid in the middle of the planet. So in the Earth's case, it's iron. In Jupiter's case, it's liquid metallic hydrogen. Now, we don't really know the properties of liquid metallic hydrogen because it's really difficult

to produce that in a lab. So actually, you know, Jupiter is one of our best places to understand the properties. But it's clearly electrically conducting because it generate, you know, the rotation of this fluid inside of Jupiter produces electric currents that drive this enormous magnetic field. So you need a rotating fluid. You also need the heat to be escaping. So this fluid is not only rotating, but it's also convecting. Like if you have hot air rising above a radiator and then in the other part of the room it sinks, you have to set up these convection cells that produce a stable set of electric currents that can produce a global magnetic field.

And in Jupiter's case, it's extremely effective at producing the most powerful magnetic field in the solar system and driving on these very powerful processes. So that brings me then to, we've talked a little bit about the Aurora and then the magnetosphere and how that, what that tells us about what's going on, I suppose, to a degree. at the very core of Jupiter. We haven't talked much about the in-between. I suppose what we kind of call... I've always found it odd, calling it the surface of Jupiter, because I always think of surfaces as hard things that you can put your tea on or stand on. But what, if you could just give us a picture of what the kind of makeup of, you know, Jupiter's surface

and its atmosphere is like? Okay, well, the first thing to say is that Jupiter is a gas giant planet. It's a fundamentally different planet to the one that we're kind of. sitting or standing on. It doesn't have a solid surface. So it means that effectively you have gas in the upper atmosphere and that gas gradually gets more and more dense until it eventually turns into a sort of liquid, superfluid, liquid kind of weird state.

And then eventually we think it just produces this liquid metallic mantle of Jupiter. There could be a solid core in the middle of Jupiter. That's one of the things that Juno, sorry, is looking for. But even that turns out to be not quite as simple as we were originally expecting. There seems to be a core there, but it's fuzzy and sort of diffused into the surrounding mantle. So that's the big difference really between a gas giant and a terrestrial planet is that there's no real solid surface. So when we talk about the radius of Jupiter, what we're talking about is some defined

pressure level that we all agree is the outer boundary of Jupiter. And that is the pressure effectively at the same pressure that it's in this room at the moment. So when we talk about the Jovian radius, we usually talk about the one bar pressure level. And so the atmosphere is then the weather layer is above that, and that's where the cloud, are and the Aurora and things like that. Below that, you have effectively increasing pressure, increasing temperature, and you get into this weird electrically conducting kind of state. So that brings me nicely to my next question, which is there's some pretty wild weather on Jupiter.

Obviously, there's the iconic giant red spot, the great red spot, sorry. Can you just sort of, from perhaps from a human perspective, perspective, what are these storms like compared to say something that we would experience here on Earth? Okay, so the first difference, really, is the scale of these things. I mean, when you look at a picture of Jupiter, you see something that looks superficially like the storms that we might see, you know, in the equatorial regions or even here on the Earth. But actually, these things are huge. They're enormous. The Great Red Spot would swallow the Earth. It's a huge anticyclone. It's very tall.

So when you look at the James Webb images, it appears very bright. That's because the top of it is really high in the atmosphere. But it also has very deep roots. It goes really deep down into the atmosphere. So these are extremely large storms. And one of the reasons why it's interesting to study Jupiter is that the weather systems are not disrupted by pesky land. So land gets in the way and disrupts the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic, for example,

and causes the tracks to divert around. Well, you don't have any of that on Jupiter. So it gives the atmospheric dynamics researchers a really good laboratory for studying how their models work. And if they can make things work on Jupiter, then it means that they really have things, they really have their understanding correct. So these winds are extremely violent. They can flow extremely fast,

but also these things are extremely big. So if you were able to float in a balloon in Jupiter's atmosphere, you would see storms that disappear off into both horizons, and it would be an absolutely awesome view. And you would see towering clouds, towering above the main cloud deck. In fact, there are three cloud decks on Jupiter, not just one, just like anything else about Jupiter.

It's the best, it has the most. You know, it is supersized. You know, these things are impressive. And you talked earlier about sort of Jupiter's significance, you know, why we do find it so interesting in part because it kind of helps us, you know, look beyond our solar system into other galaxies and find ways to study them.

But what are the significance of gas giants generally? They seem to be quite important in particularly understanding solar system formation. Is that right? Yeah. So the gas giants are really important because they formed further out in the solar system than the terrestrial planets. And we know that because they've got more material there. There was more mass to attract all the dust and gas around in the proto-planetary nebula.

In fact, Jupiter is fundamental to this story because Jupiter is the largest planet. It was, it formed first. So it formed, the formation of Jupiter then influenced the formation of all the other planets around. So it was able to grab most of the, of the, of the, dust and gas that was available, and then influenced everything else. So the story of the formation of Jupiter is the story of the formation of the solar system, and then by implication the story of the formation of the Earth and therefore us. And not only did it influence the planets around Jupiter, but also it will have played an extremely important role in the evolution

of the planets. There are ideas about Jupiter destabilizing objects in its vicinity, and sending comets and various other objects in towards the inner planets. There is an idea that Jupiter was implicit in the fact that we've got water on the earth. This is an idea that has been looked at in more depth recently. But the formation of these gas giants and the subsequent evolution of the solar system is really important in understanding our own place in the cosmos. So it's not just a case of it being the biggest and the best. It's also a case of it actually being fundamentally important to our understanding of our place.

Last couple questions. One of them is about Gino. So Gino's an incredible mission to go out to Jupiter and answer a lot of these questions that we still have about Jupiter, its formation, what's going on its core, its magnetosphere. I just wanted if you give us some sense of what we've learned as this craft has been orbiting Jupiter for something like, is it, six years now? And it's done a number of orbits. Yeah, so Juno is sent to Jupiter specifically to answer some of these questions about the story and the formation of Jupiter, what its core is like and things like that. And the reason is is because the core of Jupiter and the composition of Jupiter are effectively, predicted by different formation models. So we can determine whether there's a core accretion model

or the model. And of course it turns out that Jupiter is more complicated than we were initially thinking. You know, the idea was to look to see whether Jupiter has a core or not. Well, it turns out it's sort of in between. It does have a core, but it's really fuzzy. And so that's still being worked on and the implications of that are still being worked out. The nature of the atmosphere, Juno was looking for the water on Jupiter. Now, of course, we've had one probe that went into the atmosphere of Jupiter, the Galileo probe, which specifically was looking for water, but it turned out it probably went into a really dry spot. The amount of water that it found was very low compared to what models were predicting. And so one of Jupiter's goals is

to find out actually how much water there is. You know, and that then, again, influences where Jupiter formed in the solar system, you know, the distance from the sun. Those are still actually, although a lot of progress has been made, they're still ongoing because Juno's mission is a mapping mission. It's got to look at all longitudes around the planet in order to build up a global picture in order to find out how much water there is, for example, on Jupiter. So that work is still. ongoing and there have been some extremely interesting results. The water is there. Juno has found the water. It has been able to put a number on that. It's been able to look at the

magnetic field and how lumpy the magnetic field is. So that again tells you the nature of the juvenile interior. If the magnetic field is very lumpy, then it tells you some of the magnetic field has been generated by electric currents that are flowing near the surface. And that tells you how conductive the atmosphere is, or the outer part of Jupiter's interior is. And it was much more lumpy than we expected. So that's a major result of the Juno mission. Now, from my own perspective, one of the interesting things was that when we looked,

we thought we had an idea as to about what produced Jupiter's Aurora. We thought it was due to the planet rotating very rapidly. You've got this inner moon I.O. Which is extremely volcanic, and that's outputting sulfur dioxide into the space surrounding Jupiter at the rate of one ton per second. And it's this material that's been, feels the rotation of Jupiter's magnetic field and then being propelled outwards that produces this aurora. Now, when we looked for the signatures of that, when Jupiter originally arrived at Jupiter, the signatures weren't immediately obvious in the data. And that's led to five years worth of debate about where are the auroras, how do they relate to

these signatures, where are these particles that are producing, that we think should be producing the auroras? It turns out the situation is extremely complicated. The electrons weren't barreling down where we thought they should be. We didn't always see the magnetic signatures of currents, and so there's been a lot of head scratching, and do we need to throw all, everything that we understand about Jupiter out the window? Well, recently, we've, well, I've done some work looking at comparing Jupiter's magnetic field signatures further out in the magnetic field with images of the auroras that we took using the Hubble Space Telescope,

and we've been able to compare the two and show that actually, there is a relationship between the electric currents that are flowing in the system and the brightness of the aurora to a very very strong relationship in fact and so it turns out i think that our ideas are probably right overall but we actually need to understand what's going on in between we still don't quite understand and be able to relate that to how you know the actual observations over the pole so although juno has been an extremely successful mission it's it's It's upended a lot of our understanding about Jupiter, but it's also given us a whole bunch of things to study during the extended mission, which is currently ongoing and will hopefully

provide great data for the next few years. And then just lastly, I'm just curious, we be out in the garden this weekend with your binoculars or a telescope, or is that a bit too much like work at the weekend? No, I love it. I've got my two young kids out looking at the night sky. We look at, obviously Jupiter is the best thing to look at, you know, but we look at all the rest of the sky. And it's a really exciting thing to do with the family.

So, you know, especially when you've got events like Jupiter being very bright. I do like to go out and have a look and I encourage everybody to do so. It's great to get out and look up. That was Dr Jonathan Nichols there, an associate priest. professor at the University of Leicester, who studies planetary Aurora. Jupiter will be in opposition on Monday, but there'll be great views of the planet all weekend. If you want to learn how to spot Jupiter for yourself, visit sciencefocus.com forward slash space, forward slash Jupiter hyphen in hyphen opposition. And of course, do follow us on Twitter or Instagram to see the

incredible images that will no doubt pour out to this event. Ben. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship,

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