Deep Dive
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be talking about the great red spot of Jupiter. That's right. You know, we've talked about the Jovian moons before. Jupiter comes up time and time again. We did an episode talking about, you know, the mythical connotations of Jupiter, for sure. But, you know, we've never done an episode just on Jupiter.
And we're not going to do that today. We're focusing on a detail of Jupiter. I think Jupiter is just too big. Like, is it too big of a topic? Well, probably not. We could cover it in multiple episodes. But Jupiter is just so large that it feels intimidating to even attempt to cover all of it. Oh, we're doing it piece by piece. Defeat in detail. That's right. It's like eating an elephant, as they say.
Yeah, Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, commanding, as we've covered before, its own vast system of moons.
Its massiveness is such that a Jupiter mass is actually used as a unit to describe the mass of other massive cosmic bodies. And given its size and proximity to Earth, humans have known of the fifth planet since very ancient times, long before the invention of the telescope, with observations made by ancient Babylonians, ancient Chinese, among others. It's bright and it is observable to the naked eye.
Right. You may, in fact, associate Jupiter with the dawn of the age of the telescope. And that could be because Jupiter is very important in, say, the story of Galileo's early observations. Like Galileo, one of the most important things he saw early on with the telescope was the moons of Jupiter when he discovered the Galilean moons named after him now.
But, yeah, we knew about the planet as a point of light in the sky, one of the movable stars going back thousands of years. That's right. So there are a number of ways. I mean, Jupiter is an immensely important planet, in addition to just being immense in all sorts of ways. The main thing we're going to be talking about here today, though, is less essential, but more of...
an interesting detail and indeed an iconic detail of its appearance, that being the Great Red Spot, the big red storm that is visible on the planet Jupiter. And I think more to the point is highly visible in every illustration you've ever seen of the solar system, every drawing of the solar system and specifically the planet Jupiter that you ever had to do or chose to do as a child and onward.
I would say that the great red spot sort of gives Jupiter a face that some of the other gas giants don't have, though, as we may discuss later on in this episode or the next, there are similar visible weather patterns and storms on some of the other gas giants. There is a, there, there's a big spot on Saturn. There's a spot on Neptune as well. We've talked about before, but I would say none of those other gas
are as clear and easy to see and as just kind of face-like as the red spot on Jupiter. Yeah, like a great red eye staring at us, judging us, maybe protecting us a little bit. And, you know, of course, it's not really an eye. You know, we're glad it's nothing. Oh, what if it was just a blemish on Jupiter's face and we've just been staring at it the whole time? So rude. My belts are up here, yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, even with great vision and optimal eyesight, humans were unable to glimpse the details of the gas giant's swirling surface until the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century C.E.
So, to be clear, humans have only been capable of observing the great red spot of Jupiter for roughly three centuries. And the really interesting thing on top of this is that the planet's key identifying mark, again, that every schoolchild can replicate, is neither a permanent or even long-lasting feature, certainly in terms of the life of a planet, but rather a temporary atmospheric occurrence that seemingly comes and goes.
We've only been observing it for a very short amount of time, you know, as a human observed phenomenon. Yeah, and I guess it can actually be weird in terms of its existence in time from two different directions. On one hand, if you think of it as time,
the, a feature of the surface of a planet, the fact that it's a weather pattern makes it actually quite kind of transient and unstable. It, you know, it sort of undermines the ground beneath your feet to think that the face of another planet in our solar system, which we learned when we were children in school could be changing within our lifetimes. Even on the other hand, it's,
If you think about it as a weather pattern, it's kind of freaky how stable it is for decades or even hundreds of years. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. All right, well, let's get into the history of the observation of the Great Red Spot. So given that observation of the Great Red Spot wasn't possible before the telescope, when do human observers start noticing it during the telescope era?
Based on what I was reading here, the earliest possible observation, and I think ultimately, as we'll discuss, unlikely observation, dates back to May 9, 1664. And that's when 17th century English polymath and author of Micrographia, Robert Hooke,
observed something on the face of Jupiter that he described as a small spot moving east to west, quote, in the biggest of the three obscure belts of Jupiter.
Now, we could easily do a whole episode on Robert Hooke. He had his hands in multiple areas of scientific inquiry. He was especially active in the study of the microscopic world using new microscopic technology. His book Micrographia concerns this work. In fact, I'm to understand he coined the term cell in this book. So he was concerned with the little things, but also the ginormous things such as Jupiter.
But based on a subsequent 1666 observation and 1987 analysis by Marco Forlani in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, I was reading it as thought that this would have situated the spot in what is now known as the North Atlantic.
equatorial belt, the Great Black Belt, according to the American Physical Society, while the Great Red Spot that we know today is in the South equatorial belt.
So given what we've already explored and what we'll be getting into, you might well wonder if this was actually a different storm that Hooke was observing. Well, possibly. But Forlani's argument here was that Hooke actually was looking at the shadow of the transit, you know, the silhouette of the second largest Jovian moon, Callisto.
or some other transit shadow. The Royal Society backed Hook's claim, however, and there are various arguments about nationalism and so forth that would have been wound up in that judgment at the time. Yeah, so I've read the same analysis. So the question is,
Did did he observe the same storm that we see today as the Great Red Spot? Probably not. Was it maybe a different storm than we see today? Possibly. Or was it the the shadow cast or the silhouette of one of the moons? And for Lonnie says the latter. Yeah. Yeah. And that seems to be a fairly convincing argument here.
Now, the other possibility in terms of first or earliest documented sighting of the red spot takes us to 1665, just a year after Hooke's sighting, and that's when Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Cassini noted it for the first time. In his letters, he described weeding out different transit shadow spots and noting, quote, a permanent one, which was often seen to return in the same place with the same size and shape.
So he totaled 13 observations. He calculated its rotation. He did not note the color, perhaps according to the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, because the instrumentation was too low light to really pick up on any colorization. Now, again, historians between these two tend to favor the Cassini observation because it seems that Cassini is definitely observing observations
there's a stronger case to be made that he's observing an actual storm here, an actual storm spot on Jupiter. But an important distinction to make here is that this might not have been the same storm that we see and know today as being the iconic great storm of Jupiter. The article that I referenced on the Journal of the British Astronomical Association article
titled May 1664, Hooke versus Cassini, Who Discovered Jupiter's Red Spot? points out that, first of all, the history of the red spot or spots is imperfect and that no one observed the red spot on Jupiter after 1713 until 1831. That's when Heinrich Schwabe observed it and then described in much greater detail
by American astronomer C.W. Pritchett in 1878, often referenced as being the individual to, quote-unquote, rediscover the Great Red Spot. So the permanent spot of Cassini and the Great Red Spot that astronomers have been observing since at least 1831, they might be two very different storms. Since around 2012, scientists have observed a shrinking of the Great Red Spot
And recent flaking has also led some to think that it might one day disappear. Some have predicted in the past as little as decades from the point of observation. Others, and certainly I think more recent observers, have urged more caution on this. I mean, I say caution, not that this is really any threat to us whatsoever, but they tend to suggest that it may last for some centuries yet.
I'm not sure if it'll last to 2401. Hard to say, but this is ultimately one of those things where no one really knows because, again, it's a storm. Everyone is familiar with the difficulties we have in predicting how the weather works on our planet. You know, it's a complex system. Likewise, it's difficult even with Jupiter to figure out, well, this storm has lasted for decades at least.
But will it last for decades more, centuries more? We just don't know. Right. So not caution in the sense of it could harm us, but maybe caution in the sense of like, don't don't go to one of the betting markets and put big money on the storm being there or disappearing in a certain timeline. There's not a whole lot we know.
It would be very interesting to see how the public responded to it, because I think back to, of course, changes in categorizations or adjustments in categorizations of Pluto as a planet or some other astral body.
And, you know, people ended up having strong opinions about that because the idea that Pluto is not on the list anymore, it made them feel threatened at times or wounded in a way. And I can imagine a similar reaction to scientists telling everyone, you know, the red spot on Jupiter is not there anymore. So don't draw Jupiter the same way. And please, everyone make corrections to your textbooks.
You know, thinking back on the Pluto thing, some people I think genuinely do get frustrated when they have to update what they know about something. But on the other hand, I think a lot of that was just people trying to be cute. Yes. Just making a little jokey post on Facebook. Like, don't take my Pluto away. But somehow, I don't know. It's something that I think snowballed from...
mostly ironic posting to begin with into like, I don't know, somehow an actual kind of sentiment about like, I'm dissatisfied with astronomy today. Yeah, it kind of at least dips its toes even in jest into sort of science denial, doesn't it? Yes, though, of course, the idea of a planet is not like a consistent objective concept.
category over time. The whole thing was like, we're updating the definition of what we consider a planet. Yeah, I mean, we could have gone in the other direction and just added a list of other things on the end there. I can't imagine people wanted to memorize more planets. So, you know, I feel like this was a good balance. Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah. You want to add Ceres to the list? Yeah.
but that's Pluto. Pluto's small and, um, and ultimately insignificant compared to the glory of Jupiter. And, uh,
And then, of course, it's Red Storm. It's a great red spot. There is another, by the way, at least one more. There is the Little Red Spot, also known as Red Spot Jr. or Oval BA, which formed in 1998 and 2000 from three white oval-shaped storms. So, again, like new stuff pops up, new details. If you look at some of the glorious detailed imagery that we now have of
the storms of Jupiter. I mean, it is a complex system. It is like a crazy swirl of madness there.
Sorry, sorry. I just had to check something off, Mike, because I had a massive musical confusion in my brain. When you said Red Spot Jr., I thought I was hearing that to the tune of the theme song of a cartoon I watched as a child called James Bond Jr., Red Spot Jr. But then it turned out I went and checked and I wasn't even remembering the theme song right. I think I was hearing the tune of the Transformers theme in my head, but putting James Bond Jr., robots in disguise. Yeah.
I don't remember James Bond Jr. Oh, man. I'm glad I could bring you on this journey with me, folks.
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Matt, what even is this weather? I know. I think it was sunny and snowing at the same time yesterday. It's crazy. I have to keep my sunglasses and my snow boots in my car at all times. But you know how I make sure my car can handle it all? Snow boots for your car? Sort of, but no. I make sure my oil change technician goes with Pennzoil Platinum full synthetic motor oil, which maximizes engine protection. And my engine needs Pennzoil Platinum to keep the adventures going through all the seasons, even if they're happening in the same day.
Ask for Pennzoil Platinum at Firestone Complete Auto Care. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. All right, so back to the Great Red Spot, GRS if you prefer. As pointed out by Simon et al. in 2018's Historical and Contemporary Trends in the Size, Drift, and Color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, published in the Astronomical Journal, we have roughly 150 years, going on 160 now, obviously, worth of recorded observations of the Great Red Spot that we can study.
Now, they point out that the measurement accuracy in all of these observations depended greatly on terrestrial atmospheric conditions, the skill of the observer, and the contrast of the Great Red Spot with its ever-moving surroundings. Because as we'll discuss, it's like there's coloration changes in there as well. It's not a consistent color over time, nor a consistent shape and size.
Nor consistent color throughout. I mean, even within the great red spot, you've got like the, the sort of central redder area and then you've got kind of a white band around the outside of it. And then that's within like the, the wider stripes, uh, along the, uh, latitudinal stripes along Jupiter, which are known as the zones and the darker, more orange or red stripes, which are known as the belts. Yeah. Yeah.
So in this paper, they averaged out reported measurements to better reflect the likely actual conditions in Jupiter's atmosphere. And I'll get to some of their general details here in a second, but we should probably point out some of the things that they highlight here as well about where our imagery comes from. So some of our most impressive images, of course, of Jupiter come not from Earth-bound telescopes and observatories, but from satellites and especially flybys of the planet Jupiter.
such as 1974's Pioneer 10 and 11. These revealed stark colorization more than detail. Then we had 79's Voyager and Voyager 2. I forget, which one became V'ger? I don't know which one. Did they both become V'ger? I don't know. We all become V'ger eventually. They revealed more complex inner working and velocity fields.
of the storm. And then we have, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, and Juno. And these have all helped to produce just a robust monitoring record of Jupiter and Jupiter's great red spot. Certainly, among other things, confirming its continual evolution, that it is a thing that is continually changing. Now, at the time of this study, they pointed to these general trends and stats. It
You can get into a great deal of detail here. We'll get into more detail as we get into this episode. But they do state that, yeah, it is in fact shrinking, though it's too large and too complex a system for us to really leave it at that and do it justice. There's a great deal of information about how its longitudinal length has continued to decrease, as has its latitudinal width.
While there's also been an observable increase in its westward drift rate. Internal velocities have increased on the east-west edges and decreased on the north and south. So it's become rounder over time. But again, it's like our mind, it's so big.
And we'll get into even more detail. I mean, Jupiter is enormous. This storm is enormous. And it is also incredibly complex. So you can't, again, you can't just talk about its color. It has multiple colors in it. And maybe those colors...
When seen from a great distance or rendered in just a certain way, it takes on a certain feeling of red or orange or sort of a rusty brown. But yeah, it's one of those things that we want to be able to categorize it as more of a single entity. I mean, it is, but it is, again, it's a great storm.
So it's not like even a planet itself we can sort of look to as a conceivable whole, and we have just a different system going on here.
Well, much like a storm on Earth. I mean, we identify it as a thing, a coherent mass. But of course, you know, it is a pattern within fluids, within masses of fluids. And so there are fluids that are constantly flowing in and flowing out from it. Yeah, yeah. You get into questions like, well, there's a hurricane. What is it made of? Well...
It's, yes, it's made of raindrops on one level, but there's a lot more to the answer. You could say it's made of energy. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I have to think about that. But we want to be able to answer the question with a succinct, oh, it's made of X, you know.
So this study also points out, yeah, you have changing size and internal wind speeds that have been observable from 79 through 2017. Again, keeping in mind the publication date of this paper. And this seemed to result in decreased internal circulation within the spot. Intensity of the storm and resulting darkness, lightness in places has also shifted significantly.
And again, I've seen this characterized as a general darkening, but I think that what you see discussed in more in-depth papers like this indicates something far more complex with coloration and brightness depending on the exact composition and intensities within the storm system.
Now, again, we absolutely don't know how long the storm will ultimately last. Again, it's an extremely temporary condition in the lifespan of a planet, but long-lasting within the context of human lives, human observation, and in comparison to terrestrial storms. That being said, more commentators these days seem to favor a longer continued lifespan for the storm, unless, I noticed at least one paper pointing out, unless something really cataclysmic occurs.
I wonder what they got in mind for that. What, like an asteroid hitting it or something? Well, this got me thinking. I was like, well, what would it take? So this is, and it does get rather fascinating because, first of all, Jupiter does take a lot of hits. And some of these hits have been, like, pretty brutal. It's pointed out in a 2019 NASA article by Carl B. Hilley.
from July 16th through July 22nd in 1994, enormous fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashed into Jupiter over the course of several days. It had just been discovered a year prior, quote, creating huge dark scars in the planet's atmosphere and lofting superheated plumes into its stratosphere. And you can look up images of this. I included a couple for us here, Joe.
Yeah, like it basically looks like the planet's lower hemisphere was hit with celestial buckshot. Yes. Yeah. It has wounds and they're strangely kind of scattered almost along a line. Yeah. You see? Yeah. Yeah. And the interesting thing is that, first of all, these scars persisted for months.
And we're reported to be, and certainly you can look at the images and see this for yourself, they're more noticeable than the Great Red Spot during this time. So this was definitely a period, and I was in school at the time, I don't remember anyone making a point out of this, but Jupiter definitely looked different as long as these scars were hanging out and we didn't freak out about updating the illustrations or anything.
But these were big hits. These were the sorts of things that if these fragments had hit the Earth, we'd be talking about an extinction event. An observation of these impacts, I was reading at the time, helped fuel efforts to better predict potential space collisions involving the Earth.
You know, certainly, you know, driving home that collisions like this still do occur in our solar system. And it's not unthinkable that they could occur to our planet. And therefore, maybe we need to keep a better eye on what's out there. Well, fortunately, we're a smaller target, both in terms of size and gravitational attraction. Yeah, Jupiter is the broad side of a barn here in any respects.
But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant. Yeah, I think as we've discussed in the show before, we need to have an idea of what's out there and all these efforts to track them and coordinate and to possibly redirect anything that's incoming, vitally important to everything we're doing on the planet, for good or ill. Yeah, and a plan of what to do, a well-researched plan. Yes. So these fragments that hit...
hit Jupiter, they didn't directly impact the red spot. We can, if you look at some of these images and you can look at one up here, Joe, you can, you can still see the much fainter spot in the, this July 1st, 1994 image that I've included for you to the right. And even if the, the red spot took a direct hit, it seems like there's plenty of reason to assume that such a large storm system hit
would maybe be slightly temporarily altered, but otherwise would remain.
So we should remember that in addition to being historically larger than the Earth in its diameter, in its footprint, the storm is also quite deep and, again, is an energetic system. Now, how deep? Fairly recent recordings give us estimates on this. According to a 2021 Wiseman Institute of Science and NASA collaboration, the Great Red Spot likely extends to a depth of about 500 kilometers or 311 miles below the planet's clouds.
And you can compare that to the storm's diameter of roughly 10,250 miles or 16,350 kilometers. So what kind of cataclysm would it take to erase the big red spot? It seems like it would need to be a cataclysm on the sort of scale that would threaten Jupiter itself, like a collision with a planet or a close passage to a massive star. And of course, in either scenario, the loss of the red spot would be the least of our worries here on Earth.
All right. Now, Rob, you asked me to look a little bit more into the nature of the storm. We've said several times now that the Great Red Spot is a storm. But what kind of storm is it? Like, what's going on there? So I looked into this. The Great Red Spot is, in the words of the authors of a paper I think you mentioned earlier, Rob, and we may come back to in the next part of the series, one by Sanchez La Vega et al. from 2024.
The great red spot is a giant anti-cyclone vortex. Now that will make more sense if we break it up into its parts. Normally when we're talking about weather, uh,
A vortex is a rotating or revolving mass of air. So when air begins flowing in a spiral around a central axis. So a tornado is a type of vortex. A hurricane is a vortex. A polar vortex is a vortex.
Vortex has the same meaning on Jupiter that it does on Earth. But of course, because we're on Jupiter, it's not rotating air. It is the atmospheric gases found on the planet, which are mostly hydrogen and helium with some other things mixed in there as well. Methane, ammonia and things like that. So that's vortex. What about the anti-cyclone bit?
Anticyclone refers to the structure of the vortex, and anticyclone is easier to understand in contrast with its opposite, which, as you might guess, is the cyclone.
A cyclone has a circulation pattern where the wind flows counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. An anticyclone is the opposite. North of the equator, an anticyclone spins clockwise. South of the equator, counterclockwise.
Now, from that distinction, you might assume that cyclones and anti-cyclones are essentially just mirror images of each other, kind of like a wind that blows from the east versus a wind that blows from the west. It's going to be about the same as just what direction it's going.
But that's not the case at all. On Earth, cyclones and anticyclones tend to have extremely different characteristics as weather. There are some exceptions, but generally, an anticyclone is going to mean clear skies, calm
calm, dry weather on the ground. Really just not much to notice. So often an anticyclone doesn't even really register to us as weather. It's just like, oh, it's nice and clear out, clear skies. It's dry. It's yeah, it was great. Great. Nice weather. Meanwhile, cyclones include stormy patterns like hurricanes and typhoons. Those are both examples of a tropical cyclone. These bring clouds, high winds and rain.
So what makes the difference? Why would the direction of rotation of a mass of air feel so different on the ground? Well, a major factor determining whether a cyclone or an anticyclone pattern forms in a mass of air is pressure. So an anticyclone forms around a region of relatively high atmospheric pressure. In high pressure, the air is dense and it wants to sink. So
So with an anti-cyclone, you've got dry, cool air from higher up in the atmosphere that converges near the center of the pattern. And then it falls down toward the earth because of the high pressure it wants to sink. And then it diverges outward from the center at the bottom. So, uh,
This is not exactly right, but just you can roughly kind of imagine a whirlpool sucking cool, dry air from way up high in the atmosphere and then funneling it down to the ground where it then kind of spreads out gently over the surface. Meanwhile, a cyclone is formed around a region of low atmospheric pressure. It's the opposite. In a low pressure region, warm, moist air near the surface begins to rise up.
And this causes more warm, moist air to flow in from all around near the surface to take its place. This is sometimes described as convergence at the surface, meaning the surface of the earth, like the ground or the surface of the sea. So it's flowing to the middle around the ground. And the air flowing to the middle from the bottom is, again, in contrast to the anticyclone, where the air flows to the middle from the top.
The low pressure and the convergence at the surface, these tend to result in cloud formation, rain, and high winds.
So why do these patterns have opposite rotation in the northern and southern hemispheres? This is because of the Coriolis effect. We've talked about this on the show before, but just to briefly refresh, it's an apparent force that manifests because it is not only the air that is moving over the surface of the Earth. It's not like the surface of the Earth is actually stationary and the air is moving around. The surface of the Earth is moving to the Earth is rotating.
And so the earth rotates counterclockwise if you're looking down at it from the North Pole, it rotates clockwise if you're viewing from the South Pole.
And as a result, objects moving in the atmosphere within the rotating reference frame of the Earth will appear to have their path deflected because the Earth itself is moving, and it will appear to be deflected to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere. And that creates these different patterns. That's why it's different on the different sides of the equator.
Uh, um, by the way, the Coriolis effect, it only manifests on large scales. The idea that it determines which way the water flows down the drain and the sink, that is a misconception. Uh, that's, that's apparently based more on things like the shape of the sink and how you pour the water. You see Coriolis forces popping up in like big movements of masses, like weather and ocean currents and stuff like that. The Simpsons taught us wrong on this one. They did. Yes. Yeah.
A rare miss for them. You know, the Simpsons often they get the math and science right. Usually.
If you're not familiar with what we're talking about, I don't remember the season, but they travel to Australia. Yes. Where the U.S. Embassy has a toilet, like a high-tech toilet that's been specially designed to force a northern hemisphere directional flush effect as opposed to a southern hemisphere flush, which again, as we're making clear here, is not a thing.
Right. To make it flow the right way. Yeah.
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American Public University. Value for the whole family. Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.
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Matt, what even is this weather? I know. I think it was sunny and snowing at the same time yesterday. It's crazy. I have to keep my sunglasses and my snow boots in my car at all times. But you know how I make sure my car can handle it all? Snow boots for your car? Sort of, but no. I make sure my oil change technician goes with Pennzoil Platinum full synthetic motor oil, which maximizes engine protection. And my engine needs Pennzoil Platinum to keep the adventures going through all the seasons, even if they're happening in the same day.
Ask for Pennzoil Platinum at Firestone Complete Auto Care. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. But anyway, back to the storms here. So again, cyclones form the basis of most storms and bad weather on Earth. I mentioned there were some exceptions. There are some occasional large anti-cyclone storms that can form for various reasons, but that's more rare. On Earth, most of your big storms are cyclones. Tropical cyclones like hurricanes and typhoons are
form over low pressure regions in the ocean north and south of the equator. So they form these massive rotating systems where you've got warm, wet air that comes up off of the ocean and it circulates and forms a spiral of thunderstorms with high winds and
And generally these storms, they build up in energy and intensity and they can travel around. And they usually dissipate once the storm either moves onto land or into cooler waters at higher latitudes, robbing the storm of the warm, wet air that supplies it with energy and keeps it going.
So Jupiter's great red spot is an anti-cyclone vortex. It is a spiraling storm, but unlike most of these big storms on Earth, it is a high pressure system, not a low pressure system. And it rotates in the anti-cyclonic direction counterclockwise in Jupiter's southern hemisphere.
So that's the two parts of the description, anticyclone vortex. But there was a third word. It is a giant anticyclone vortex. And it is indeed giant. You were already alluding to this, Rob. How big exactly is the storm? It seems currently it is more than 16,000 kilometers wide, which is bigger than the entire planet Earth, as we've said. Earth's diameter is something like 12,750 kilometers. The Red Storm is more than 16,000 kilometers.
And I also just want to briefly compare this to the biggest storms in the historical record on earth. The largest storm ever recorded doesn't mean necessarily the largest storm ever to occur, but the biggest one we ever measured was typhoon tip, a tropical cyclone that formed in the Western Pacific in October, 1979, uh,
Tip was huge with a peak diameter of more than 2,200 kilometers. A common comparison people make is that if you laid the storm out over the eastern United States, the edges of the storm would reach from Texas to New England. It was just gigantic by Earth's standards.
But of course, the Great Red Spot is not only a lot bigger than that storm, it's bigger than the whole planet. And it is not even currently at its maximum size, as you were talking about, Rob. When it was first observed, the diameter of the spot was estimated to be almost 50,000 kilometers, which is more than three times the width of Earth. I think actually almost four times the diameter of Earth.
Uh, and so again, contained in that fact about the change over time is the implication that the great red spot fluctuates greatly in terms of size and structure. Another thing is the contrast in intensity with the, the biggest storms we know about on earth, uh, in typhoon tip, the wind gusts reached more than 300 kilometers per hour, which is absolutely crazy. That is really, really high wind, uh,
But the Great Red Spot storm is even more intense. I've read different numbers here for the wind speeds. I'm not sure, but I wonder if any discrepancies in the accounting might have to do with the fact that there's no solid surface below to measure the winds against. I don't know if it has to do with the fact that it's fluid on fluid, but...
Anyway, I was looking for a good source on this, and I used a fact page from NASA's Juno mission, which was focused on Jupiter's atmosphere, among other things. So that seems to be a good authority. And they peg the range of wind speeds within the Great Red Spot at 430 to 680 kilometers per hour or 270 to 425 miles per hour. That would be within the outer reaches where the winds are the most intense range.
In any case, way, way more powerful than the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in history on Earth. Yeah, I mean, it's just an absolute monster on a scale that staggers the imagination, challenges the imagination. And it's a planet that is, again, it's a gas giant, as we've been driving home. There is no hard surface. Like, it's...
we can't even picture ourselves in the midst of it. Like we have an easier time picturing ourselves, of course, on the surface of something like Venus, which in and of itself is a completely alien and inhospitable environment. Yeah. Would kill you, but there's something to stand on. There's at least something to stand and crumble onto. Here, it's just, it's, oh, it's Jupiter, baby.
But so, yes, the the red spot of Jupiter is a giant high pressure storm in contrast to most of Earth's low pressure storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter's southern hemisphere swirling in the anti cyclonic direction.
But there are a bunch of interesting questions that remain, some of which we have fairly good ideas of how to answer, some of which are much more mysterious. And there are only some kind of educated guesses. Questions like the one you raised. How long is it going to be around? One question that's interesting is how does this storm persist for so long over time? Storms on Earth don't last that long.
And also the question of how did it form in the first place? So I think we should come back and do a part two on the great red spot, Rob. Yeah, yeah. Get into why this color? You might think it's the jelly filling of the planet, but that's that's inaccurate. If you've read that somewhere, that's that's a lie. And we will look at more plausible answers to that question in the next episode.
In the meantime, since we have several days before that episode will come out, we would love to hear from you. If you have, especially I'm interested for examples from various science fiction films where Jupiter pops up in the background and
or at least the red storm is acknowledged. And then I want to know what year that is supposed to take place and how we might therefore couch that in our very vague and shifting understanding of how long this storm has lasted and how long it will last.
Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and 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, well, we have different social media accounts. You can follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And on Instagram, we're s2bympodcast. So if you use that, you can find us there.
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 at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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