The Great Eye of Jupiter, Part 2
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. We are back with our second episode on the great red spot of Jupiter. And in the last episode, we'll get sort of a rundown of what we talked about last time. But one of the things we did mention a few different times is how Jupiter does show up in science fiction, oftentimes just as a backdrop, sometimes in a more...

plot-oriented fashion. But I was looking around because I'm like, okay, if I dive deeper into written fiction, I'm sure there's some great hardcore Jupiter sci-fi that references the spot. And sure enough, there's a novella from, let's see, 1971. It's

I believe the original version of it was published in Playboy magazine and it's set in the year 2050. It is titled A Meeting with Medusa by the legendary Arthur C. Clarke.

Oh, yeah. Huge jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This is sort of this is an airship story, isn't it? It is. Yeah, this is a this is a pretty famous one. I've never read it, which is why it didn't come to my mind immediately. And we may have referenced it on the show in the past, but it was a it was a big was a Nebula Award winner. Highly influential tale.

I wish I'd had a chance to read it in full ahead of our recording, but I did go through it and look for references to The Great Red Spot. And there are actually a couple of them. It's kind of bookended because I believe on the way in, our main character is sort of pining for a visit to The Great Red Spot. And then later when he leaves,

He's he's you know, he feels kind of bittersweet about it and thinks, well, maybe I'll see it next time. Now, this is in no way meant as a criticism of the story, but I this did cause me to think with the great red spot feel like the great red spot if you were in it instead of looking at it from above, you know? Yeah.

It's like imagining wanting to go to an island because the island is shaped like something when seen from orbit. But like when you're on the island, it wouldn't be shaped that way. You'd just be on on land. Yeah, it's like I love the shape of Australia. I really want to visit it someday so I can appreciate its shape.

But then again, I'm sure the Great Red Spot, like, you know, like many things on Jupiter would be would have fascinating local characteristics as well. It just wouldn't be a Great Red Spot anymore. It would be whatever. I don't know. Winds whipping around you. So this this story can be obtained, I believe, in at least in one major Arthur C. Clarke collection and certainly go out and read it in full. Write into us if you have read it in full and if you have thoughts on it. But I want to read one quick passage from it that references the Great Red Spot.

The Great Red Spot, itself the most spectacular of all the planet's features, lay thousands of miles to the south.

It had been a temptation to descend there, but the South Tropical Disturbance was unusually active, with currents reaching over 900 miles an hour. It would have been asking for trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait for future expeditions. Wow, what a coincidence. I'm actually going to end up in this episode talking about the South Tropical Disturbance. That's not a thing made up for the Arthur C. Clarke story. That's a real thing. Yeah.

And it's also, I mean, I like how he's acknowledging the mysteries of the Great Red Spot, because as we've been discussing, there are plenty of mysteries that still remain about it. Absolutely. Aside from any giant jellyfish or manta rays dwelling there. Yeah.

Yeah, so we're back to continue our discussion of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a massive storm visible from Earth by telescope. In the last episode, we discussed the history of the spot's observation in the telescopic age, beginning in the 17th century, and then with greatly improved imaging capabilities in the 20th century and beyond.

We discussed how the Great Red Storm we know today might not be the storm that Giovanni Cassini noted in 1665, and how the storm is long-lasting compared to terrestrial storms, but still a temporary atmospheric feature in the life cycle of a planet. So it won't be there forever, but we don't know when it will go away. So regarding the observations in the 1800s, I don't recall if this came up in the last episode. You can remind me if I've forgotten this, Rob, but I actually found

found out that there was a photo, a telescopic photo of the great red spot taken of Jupiter in the 19th century. It was taken by Irish astronomer Agnes Mary Clerk in 1879. And Rob, I attached a copy of this black and white photo for you to look at in the outline here. You don't get a lot of definition on the various bands going back and forth like you see in the good color photos of Jupiter today. Mainly it looks like one sort of

light gray ball with a big dark stripe in the middle and then just a huge gigantic elongated oval on one side of the equatorial stripe and apparently at the time this photo was taken it was estimated that the great red spot was was about 40 000 kilometers in length

So much bigger and much more elongated than it is today. That goes with what we were saying last time about the Great Red Spot shrinking and becoming rounder over time. And these observations more than 100 years ago, it was gigantic and it was way more flattened out. Yeah, definitely look up this 1879 photograph if you have the ability to do so.

Let's see, we also discussed the nature of the storm itself somewhat, an enormous anticyclone that dwarfs not only any storm we've ever known on Earth, but the Earth itself. And in this episode, we're back to discuss more facts, observations, and hypotheses concerning the Great Red Spot and the planet it calls home.

So Rob, one of the questions we raised last time that we didn't really get into was the question of why the great red spot is red and not some other color. Of course, though, we did briefly allude to the fact that it's sort of a mix of different areas, right? There's an outer ring that's sort of like clear or white that is sometimes known as the hollow. And then inside that, you've got the redder or more orange oval. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. We talked about its greatness, but not its redness so much. I want to discredit a couple of hypotheses real quick. First of all, the great red spot is not the jelly insertion point on a planet that is in essence one gigantic jelly filled donut.

I think this would be a reasonable guess to make, but it's not true. Even when you're talking about a real life donut, you just don't like thinking about the jelly insertion point. Don't you just want to imagine it somehow in there without a needle? You know, it was violently injected. They don't even try and hide it. I guess it's how you know what's inside. Maybe they feel like they're doing you a favor. You get a little peek at the dribble. Yeah. It's also not, as my child suggested this morning, the vast swirlings of trillions upon trillions of tabby cats.

This was their joke guess. Their serious guess, by the way, was that it was red tinted chemicals in the Jovian atmosphere, which we'll get back to. I thought that's a that's a pretty good guess. But as we did talk about in the last episode, yeah, the great red spot is not entirely one color and its overall colorization and contrast has shifted quite a bit.

As we mentioned, 17th century observations of this, or more likely a previous storm, did not know the spot's color, as it was not detectable if that color was present. But by

By and large, we've seen the following trends in its overall color. And I got these from a couple of different sources that we also cited last time. Historical and Contemporary Trends in the Size, Drift, and Color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot by Simon et al. from 2018. And Colors of Jupiter's Large Anticyclones and the Interaction of a Tropical Red Oval with the Great Red Spot in 2008 by Sanchez-LaVega et al.

And I'll look at some more recent observations as well and a couple of other sources. But in 1974, this is when Pioneer 1 and 2 went by, striking red colorization. 2014, 2015, there was an intensification, a deeper orange color. 2016, 2017, further darkening. And we have to stress that in none of these cases are we talking about only changes in color.

but also various changes in dimension, intensity, morphology, and brightness. So a lot of the analysis ends up getting into like, okay, we can look at the color and the color intensity, but then we can attempt to chart out where those changes match up with other changes and looking to why those changes would, in fact, impact the colorization.

The paper by Simon et al. points out some of these following facts I want to run through. They write that the GRS's color changes from 2014 to 2017 may be explained by changes in stretching vorticity or divergence acting to balance the decrease in relative vorticity.

Historically, they point out intensity of the Great Red Spot's color appeared to be somewhat correlated with motion. The color was more intense or it was darkest when it accelerated. Color and drift rate also historically seem to correlate. Oh, that's interesting. So it seems to be shifting to the red when the winds are moving faster. Yeah, that's my understanding of it here.

But one of the big things that they drive home is that correlating the Great Red Spot's color changes with an actual physical mechanism is really challenging. And so a lot of the work in these papers seems to really get into that and come up with various hypotheses as to how this could be occurring. They point out that drift rate slash motion doesn't present an obvious physical mechanism other than possibly via cloud ingestion rate.

They say that vortex stretching, this is the lengthening of vortices in three-dimensional fluid flow, is a possible physical mechanism. And they also point out that the most recent, at the time, 2014 through 2017 changes in internal cloud morphology and color might have been due to changes in divergence, internal vorticity, and vortex stretching rather than being correlated to its drift rate. Now, some of that may just wash past you, and I do want to acknowledge that

Well, first of all, this is a very complex topic, and I'm just going to, you know, attempting to do my best to relate the basics of it here. But also, I have to acknowledge that everything I just said didn't really answer the question of why is it red or why is it orange or rust colored? Like, what is the redness? Like, what are we looking at? And discussion of this topic is complex. It seems far from settled. But it's a very complex topic.

But a lot of it, as far as I can understand, revolves around candidates for the underlying chromophores. So the underlying particles that produce a given color, sometimes collectively with other chromophores in general, talking about in general how chromophores function and create colors that we sense. But in the case of the Great Red Spot,

We're also considering all of this in light of the aforementioned interactions going on in the storm, including especially how high up into the atmosphere these particles are pushed. Now, there's a particular NASA JPL scientist who is the lead author and sometimes I think maybe the supporting author on a lot of papers about this. And it's a man by the name of Robert A. West.

The particular one I was looking at here is Jovian Clouds and Haze by West, Baines, and Friedson. And in this paper, they present a whole list of both organic and inorganic chromophore candidates for the Great Red Spot that had been proposed over the years by that point. So they're compiling them from different papers, different scientists, and so forth.

I'm not going to include them all, but they include the likes of hydrazine and white phosphorus on the inorganic side. And on the organic side, the list includes the likes of acetylene photopolymers,

proton-irradiated CH4 plus NH3, that's methane plus ammonia, and even biota, living organisms. And the paper that they're citing for this idea was a 1976 paper by Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter, who speculated on the possibility of not only life on Jupiter, but a Jovian ecology. Mm-hmm.

Okay. So this is in speculation mode, not a, not, not to say that we have good reason to think that the red colors would be caused by living organisms, but like, what if they were caused that way? I mean, we know that say blooms of algae in the earth, in the earth's oceans can change the color of the oceans. You can have various reasons that microorganisms change the color of a landscape feature. So what if that's what's happening in the atmosphere of Jupiter?

Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the oceans because that's one of the main things that Sagan and Salpeter are referencing and sort of using as a model. And it's a very in-depth paper. It's not a general audience specific paper, but I want to read a quick quote from it here.

So, yeah, to be clear, I don't believe this is a widely held candidate for a place in our solar system where you could find extraterrestrial life. Like, it's not a best-case scenario. Yeah.

But in the paper, the paper is quite interesting. And in it, they outline how they believe Jupiter's atmosphere could feature, quote, ecological niches for sinkers, floaters and hunters. And they explore the possibility that such life forms could exist at different stages of development in all three niches.

So a sinker in this scenario would be a primary photosynthetic autotroph that reproduces as it passively sinks down through the atmosphere among its kind. So comparable to like plankton in Earth's oceans. Okay.

So getting energy from the sun, making its food that way, and then sinking down passively through the atmosphere. Right. And then the floaters would be autotrophic or heterotrophic organisms that float via some manner of inflated bladder. So these would be your space jellies, and they would eat the sinkers. Okay. And or they would depend on solar energy as well. Okay. Yeah.

And then the hunter would be the next step, a predator jellyfish type creature that hunts on the floaters. Or maybe it's a manta ray. You know, you can you can sort of go wild with the imagination here. Big crab with a bunch of balloons attached to it. Yeah. Yeah. That's the kind of thing you see depicted.

And they point out that if this were the case, and again, this is all speculation, they were just, you know, it's like, what if and how would it work if they say that there would be clear, there would be clear evolutionary lines to connect between these different forms.

And another thing that's interesting is, you know, this is exactly the line of thinking that Arthur C. Clarke employed in that earlier novella that we cited, though, of course, his vision being a sci-fi tale published in Playboy obviously lacked the scientific rigor presented in the Sagan-Saulpeter paper here.

Yeah. Though, of course, Clark was quite concerned in many ways with plausibility, but he's also just trying to tell a good story. Right. And not really featuring a lot of equations. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, no shade at Arthur C. Clark at all here. Yeah.

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So as interesting as all this is, the more accepted theories for red chromophores in the great red spot of Jupiter, they're not based on the idea that there's life in there. We still don't have a firm answer, but I wanted to discuss at least one of the more recent ideas that seems to have gotten a lot of attention. So there was one from 2014. This was an idea presented by Kevin Baines, a NASA Cassini team scientist, who

And he proposed that what we're broadly seeing is perhaps a mixture of ammonia and acetylene gases blasted by solar energy in the high upper reaches of the Great Red Spot.

So we mentioned in the last episode that the Great Red Spot is pretty deep. It goes pretty deep down. But I don't know if we really talked about how high up it goes. I've read that the Great Red Spot may extend something like eight kilometers or five miles above the surrounding cloud tops in Jupiter's atmosphere. Hmm.

So the idea here is it's pushing its contents up higher in the atmosphere than the surrounding areas, and in doing so, subjecting them to greater solar interference, greater solar UV light.

And laboratory results have apparently indicated that this is possible. So the idea here is that we have these chromophores, these ammonia and acetylene gases that are not already red in color, but they are shot up high enough that they are exposed to more UV light, more solar radiation. And that is what generates the color that we see as the great red spot. Hmm. Okay. If this happens,

hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the great red spot is not like red all the way down. It would just be red more or less at the surface, something that you see compared in some of the science journalism, especially to a sunburn. Yeah. OK, so I saw this. I saw articles describing the sunburn hypothesis of the redness.

Though a different mechanism, obviously, than like inflamed skin. But skin deep, I guess, is the metaphor you could use here. Now, to be clear, there are other competing hypotheses in which it wouldn't be possible.

just gray or white underneath. It would be like red all the way down. These competing hypotheses still envision some model in which there are red chromophores that are pushed up through the storm from greater depths, but they're red in color within the storm as well as at the upper surface.

So again, yeah, it's a complex topic. It's so red. Why is it so red? Well, we don't know for sure, but we have some very interesting hypotheses as to why. Some definitely more believable and likely than others. But that being said, I do love the idea that, hey, what if it's red because it's just full of life? That would be crazy. Yeah. What if we're looking at algal blooms in certain bands along the surface? Yeah.

In a way, it's the more exciting. Well, I mean, I think all these ideas are exciting, but you can imagine where that idea would maybe be that nice mix of exciting and accessible to the average person. But yeah, I don't think that's what's going on there. So I wanted to come back to a question we raised in the last episode. We established last time that the great red spot of today, at least according to

Most informed observers is probably not the same red spot seen by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini in the 17th century. You know, we talked about him. He saw a spot in the 1660s, but it's probably not the same one.

for a number of reasons, one of which is that astronomers stopped seeing the spot for like many decades. It was like suddenly like in the 1700s, people are not seeing this thing anymore. And it seems like astronomers don't note a giant red spot again until about 1831. So that seems quite implausible if it was the same spot and it was there the whole time. Yeah. Otherwise, people would clearly keep describing it. It's pretty exciting, you know.

So it's very unlikely that it's the same spot astronomers saw in the 17th century. But that suggests that storms like this come and go. And if they come and go, where do they come from? How did the current spot arise in the first place?

Now, in 2024, there was a bunch of reporting about the origin of the Great Red Spot based on the publication of a scientific paper that we did mention in part one of the series. But I'm going to give the full citation here. The paper is called The Origin of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

And it was by a group of authors, the first author of which we actually just mentioned in another paper by them a moment ago. But anyway, it's by Augustin Sanchez-La Vega, Enrique Garcia-Malendo, John Legareta, Arnaud Miró, Manel Soria, and Kevin Arens Velazquez. This was published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2024.

And the authors of this paper were based, I believe, all in Spain at several different institutions like the University of the Basque Country and Polytechnic University of Catalonia. And in addition to this paper, I relied on some explanation and analysis from several articles, especially one in Scientific American by the astronomer and science communicator Phil Plait. That was from July 2024.

Now, before I get into the details about this discovery, I did want to mention a bit of background about the structure of Jupiter and its atmosphere, because that kind of informs this research. So a few things about the structure of Jupiter we didn't quite get into yet. Jupiter is made mostly of the same thing the sun is made of, actually, of hydrogen and helium.

And so if you're going from the outside in, Jupiter has a vast layer of atmospheric gas, again dominated by hydrogen and helium, along with small amounts of other stuff like water, methane and ammonia and some hydrocarbons like benzene.

And then beneath that, you keep going down and the pressure eventually becomes so great that the hydrogen takes a liquid form and you will have a planet wide ocean of liquid hydrogen. So that makes it the runaway winner for the largest ocean in the solar system. Though one thing that's worth noting is that the boundaries between these layers are not

Instead, they gradually bleed into one another. So falling through the atmosphere of Jupiter into its global ocean would not be like falling through the atmosphere of Earth and then suddenly hitting the surface of the water where you hit with a smack.

Instead, you would be continually sinking through a thick, hot hydrogen-helium stew of increasing density and heat as you go down, which eventually becomes fully liquid. And then, of course, if you keep going down from there, conditions change further. Further into the liquid hydrogen ocean, you reach a layer of what scientists call liquid metallic hydrogen.

At this point, the pressure is so extreme that electrons pop off of the hydrogen atoms. So normally a hydrogen atom is one proton and one electron. Here, the electrons get squeezed off of these atomic nuclei and they could flow unrestrained through the fluid, making it extremely electrically conductive like a metal atom.

which actually creates the dynamo effect that scientists think is responsible for generating Jupiter's magnetic field. So this metallic hydrogen layer is also known as the inner mantle, and it takes up most of the planet's radius. If you measure the diameter of Jupiter, most of it is this metallic hydrogen layer.

And then even deeper than that, the mantle is thought to graduate into a loose core made of denser materials, maybe some rocky, icy solids left over from the planet's early formation. But there's still a bunch of unanswered questions about exactly what the core is made of and how it is structured. This was one of the issues that NASA's Juno mission was investigating. But anyway, when you look at the composition of the planet like this,

It makes me think about how in the previous episode, probably a bunch of times, I was saying stuff about the surface features of Jupiter. I was talking about the red spot and other things you can see this way. But of course, Jupiter does not actually have a surface. What we're describing when we talk about its surface are in reality patterns of clouds at the top of Jupiter's atmosphere.

I mean, it even gets complicated when we start talking about the surface of Earth, because as we've talked about in our discussions of the deep ocean, you know, it's like, I mean, technically the deep ocean, if you're at the bottom of the sea, you're standing on the rocky surface of the planet. So, you know, it's like our world's kind of weird. And then we all equate everything to the slim layer of the atmosphere in which we can live. So, yeah. What do we mean by surface with a planet anyway? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, often it gets into a question of definition. It's not as clear as you thought. What do you mean by surface? And a lot of times what we mean when we're just talking casually is what's the part of the planet I can see from space? Yeah. Like how would like balloon based floating organisms judge life on Earth? Like we would all be considered like bottom dwellers or something. Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, another thing that's important to understand about the structure of Jupiter, if you're going to get into the origins of the Great Red Spot, is the planet's zonal striping pattern.

Jupiter has these lateral bands going parallel to its equator. You've got dark stripes, mostly red and orange in color, from our perspective at least, and white or light colored stripes. These are known as belts and zones, respectively. The dark stripes are the belts and the light stripes are the zones.

Jupiter generates a lot of internal heat. The majority of the heat in Earth's atmosphere comes from the sun, comes down from above. But the majority of heat in Jupiter's atmosphere actually comes from deep within Jupiter itself. It's getting more heat from inside than from outside. So the superheated lower strata of Jupiter's atmosphere and the liquid hydrogen level, these

Fluids create convection currents as the heat wants to rise. So hot fluid rises up through low pressure areas of the atmosphere all the way up to the top, and then it cools, circulates, and sinks back down again in higher pressure areas. Actually similar to what happens with air circulation patterns on Earth. But...

The gas giants are larger than the inner planets, and they rotate faster. A day on Jupiter is only 9.9 hours. So this extremely fast rotation causes a pronounced Coriolis effect, which we talked about last time in the context of Earth.

Jupiter's Coriolis effect is more extreme than Earth's because Jupiter is larger and spinning faster. And this pronounced Coriolis effect creates powerful jet streams running parallel to Jupiter's equator. These jet streams form the boundaries of Jupiter's belts and zones. So each zone, remember the light-colored areas, each zone tends to be a

Basically, a zone is a low-pressure area where warm fluid rises up through the atmosphere and it is bounded on each side by jet streams, with an east-running jet on the side facing the pole and a west-running jet on the side facing the equator.

Belts are the inverse. You've got high pressure areas, again, generally, where cool material sinks back down into the atmosphere, where the side facing the pole is bounded by a west flowing jet and the side facing the equator has an eastward jet.

Now, what determines the color differences in these different bands? Again, we don't know for sure. One big idea is that the zones are bright because the clouds up high in altitude, the first thing we see from the outside, contain crystals of ammonia ice, which look white, and the belts have thinning.

thinner ice clouds with less ammonia ice. So instead we see other things. We see a brown, red, or orange color, which could be caused by different chemicals, the chromophores you were talking about. Maybe it's caused by sunburn, like you mentioned, or maybe by the presence of hydrocarbons. We don't really know for sure, but it does seem like the white color of the zones is probably due to the ammonia ice clouds.

Little known fact, ammonia ice is the most popular alcoholic beverage on the planet Jupiter. Crack one open today. The jellyfish frat boys, they love the Ami ice. The Ami ice and the Ami light. Oh, but if you're a jellyfish, you can't open it with your teeth or your belt buckle. No hard parts anywhere. How do you get it open? There's going to have to be a whole other paper just on this topic. Music

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But anyway, coming back to the great red spot itself. Now, we've already talked again about the idea that the current great red spot that we see today has definitely existed for more than 190 years. It was seen and described in 1831. We have strong reason for believing it was not the same spot Cassini saw in the 1660s. So how did it form?

The study I mentioned by Sanchez-LaVega et al. used a combination of historical observations beginning in the 1600s. So like drawings made by astronomers throughout the years and descriptions that they left.

as well as modern numerical modeling of the storm to answer the question of how it formed and to answer the question of whether it was the same spot. But we've already answered that one. No, it's almost certainly not the same spot. But coming to the question of how it formed, they tested three potential explanations to see whether

which one would lead to the formation of a giant anti-cyclone storm like the great red spot in their simulation.

So we'll look at these three different hypotheses they explored one at a time. One of them is that it was created by the merging of two or more smaller storms or smaller vortices. This can and does happen frequently on Jupiter, or at least they can merge together. But when the authors ran the simulation here, they found that merging these smaller vortices together,

did not produce a storm matching the Great Red Spot. Essentially, even if you kept adding more and more smaller input storms, I think they said like four or five of them, you still did not get a system as big as the early observations of the GRS.

Also, this doesn't match because the multiple smaller storms needed were also not mentioned by astronomers before 1831. And the authors think they would have been easy enough to see that somebody probably would have noted them. So the merging of smaller vortices, that probably did not create it.

Another idea is what about a super storm or mega storm? This would be caused by an eruption of warmer material, warmer matter from lower down in Jupiter, in Jupiter's atmosphere, and that welling up into the upper atmosphere and causing a storm.

We do see things happen like this on other gas giants, like on Saturn. Saturn apparently has recurring megastorms that appear roughly between every 20 and 30 years, typically when it is summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The cause of these storms is not fully understood, but if you want to see examples of this, you can look up images that the Cassini probe took in December 2010, or actually the images might have been

maybe from 2011, but it was of a storm that emerged in the northern hemisphere of Saturn in...

in December 2010. You might have seen this before. It almost looks kind of like a big, I don't know, milky white cloud sort of billowing through like along a latitude and a line along the northern half of Saturn. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like somebody took a kind of milk straw and moved it through the through the yellow.

I have to say the images of the super storm on Saturn, it looks very chill. It's very on brand for Saturn. Yes. Everything with Saturn always feels kind of serene and everything with Jupiter feels...

Like intimidating and a bit chaotic somehow. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. Saturn, almost Saturn nine in character. So the author's considered it plausible. This could be an explanation of what's happening on Jupiter as well. Yeah. Like maybe some kind of warmer material is there's a convective current that's bringing up this warmer material from below and it's creating a storm.

They did find that an upwelling like this could create a large anticyclonic storm, but again, it was not big enough to explain the early observations of the Great Red Spot. It didn't create a system the size and shape of those early sightings. Also, Jupiter has not been observed to form superstorms of this kind at the near equatorial latitude of the Great Red Spot.

But then you get to the final idea they tested for where this could have come from. And this is what is known as the South Tropical Disturbance, bringing us back to Arthur C. Clarke.

This would be a kind of unstable wind situation. So this happens when the boundary between two of Jupiter's adjacent bands becomes unstable and essentially a jet of wind from one band pushes up into the normal latitudes of another band.

This, of course, disrupts the flow of the target band and it creates a vortex, a swirling wind pattern instead of the straight flowing wind pattern. And in this case, the resulting vortex can become huge. And the simulation of this hypothesis found that yes, indeed, it could produce a vortex matching the size and the original shape of the Great Red Spot as seen in the 19th century. They

They also found that this wind mechanism could explain the changes in size and shape of the GRS over time.

And so the authors conclude this is most likely how the great red spot formed. It was from this unstable wind, a wind condition, the South tropical disturbance, uh, the wind flowing from one band into the other, and then creating this giant vortex that was self-sustaining and has been self-sustaining for now for more than 190 years. I think 194 years today. Is that right? Something like that. Yeah.

Anyway, but this brings us back to the question that we've already addressed before. Can we use this information to judge how long it will last? Probably not really. It has been shrinking for years, especially in the last decade and a half. It seems to have been shrinking. Maybe it will disappear in the near future. But as we've said several times now, we just don't have enough information or understanding to make a firm prediction. Maybe it will last a long time yet. We don't really know.

The big question, Joe, is will it still be there in the year 2401? Because in the series finale of Star Trek Picard, that is when we see a massive Borg cube ship hide in and then emerge from the great red spot of Jupiter.

I have multiple questions about that. Why is that a good place to hide? Well, it's the last place you'd think, right? Oh, wait, do they not have cloaking? Do I forget how cloaking works? You know, there is cloaking, but I don't remember if the Borgs have cloaking. Or maybe, you know, you could see through the cloak. You know, maybe they're just being dramatic. I'm not sure.

Maybe they got to power up. They got to get some of that red, red stuff. You know, this is still part of that era where they're ruled by a queen as opposed to just being a complete like cyborg communist collective. So, you know, it's possible that they could make choices purely for dramatic purposes. OK, so the red spot, it's part of the queen's pomp and circumstance. Yeah, there you go.

Well, actually, I do have a good answer to that question, believe it or not. So we don't know if the red spot will still be there. It seems to be shrinking. Maybe it'd be gone by then. But since previous giant spots have disappeared and

and new ones have appeared, if we lose the current great red spot, it may well be replaced by another spot, maybe much like the original or like the one we have now. That's right. That's right. Great red spots come, great red spots go, but I don't know if they're ever a good place to park a spaceship. Yeah.

Well, this was a fun couple of episodes put together here. And I'd love to hear from everyone out there in general about the science we've been discussing here, but also about just the sci-fi flavor. Places where Jupiter's great red spot has popped up, certainly as a backdrop. But I'm also interested in times where it may be a setting or a location in addition to the two examples we've brought up here.

Just a reminder for everyone, 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're on Instagram, we are stbympodcast over there, we're on a few other social media accounts as well, we are weirdhouse on Letterboxd,

And, oh, yeah, we have a Discord. And if you'd like to join that Discord server, well, you can just email us at the email address we're going to share in just a minute here. 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.

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