Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge swirl their minds together into a stormy mix of puns and physics and tackle this spacey topic.
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Hey Org, have you ever been in a hurricane? Technically no, really, Panama doesn't get hurricanes.
I think we felt the effects of them, but none of them have technically touched us, except maybe like one a long time ago.
Well, then maybe you'll get your chance here in.
La Really, Los Angeles gets hurricanes.
Not very often, but the occasional Mexican hurricane is strong enough to make it all the way up here.
Ooh, I like my hurakanes a little spicy.
Yeah, there's nothing worse than like a bland hurricane. It's just boring one hundred miles an hour winds.
Hi, I'm hoorhandmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I've also never been in a hurricane.
You've never lived to tell the tale.
That's right. Never been like one of those reporters standing in knee deep water with winds blowing all around them. I would have been out of there much sooner.
Have you never been in a science hurricane, like a flurry of scientific discovery and activity, like wind of knowledge blowing over everything.
It's definitely felt like a thunderstorm, how and then with some of the conflicts and the egos, But no, never officially a science hurricane.
You've never upgraded that brainstorm to like a brain hurricane.
Maybe I'm just trapped in the eye.
But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we explore these swirling mysteries of the universe. We rain knowledge down upon you and try to blow confusion away with one hundred mile an hour winds of silly jokes. In our podcast, we tackle the biggest, deepest, most dramatic questions of the universe. We don't shy away from any and every topic, and we find some nugget of mystery or knowledge and we break it open for you and try to explain it with a few dad jokes.
That's right. We try to sweep you off your feet with giant winds of corny jokes and serious knowledge about the universe and everything in.
It, because it really does make us spend I mean, this universe we live in is fantastic. It's beautiful, it's wet, it's wild, it's crazy. There are so many things we need to understand, and not just at the most fundamental level. As a particle physicist, my job is to break the universe down to the very very smallest bits and understand the deepest, most fundamental nature of the universe. But even if we did that, it doesn't mean necessarily it would help us understand the world around us. You can't go from string theory to predicting weather. So sometimes there are deep mysteries worth tackling that are right around us, at the same scale as our lives.
Yeah, because I guess the universe does seem a little unpredictable sometimes. I mean, it's pretty chaotic out there. Even though it sort of seems nice and calm here, there are parts of the universe that are pretty crazy and there's a lot going on in there.
Yeah.
We talk a lot on the podcast about how complex phenomena arise from really simple rules and simple objects. From just a few particles, you can make everything that anybody has ever touched, tasted, or eaten, and that includes really weird stuff like people and hurricanes. It's amazing what this universe has cooked up for us out of a few basic elements, and some of it is really quite complex and very very difficult to predict. Some of it we just have to look at in wonder.
Yeah. And so here on Earth we have weather, which is pretty chaotic. Although I feel like we have done a pretty good job in miterology of predicting the weather a little bit, or at least forecasting the weather and knowing when and where hurricanes are going.
Yeah, I feel like comedy hasn't really caught up with the progress in weather science. It used to be a standing joke that nobody could predict the weather, but these days they're actually pretty good at it. I find myself relying on my little weather app to tell me if it's going to rain today or tomorrow. And maybe that's just easy see in southern California because it says it never rains.
Yeah, you just need comedians to predict the weather, you know, and just give them a sharpion. They'll know exactly where the hurricanes go.
Maybe there's wisdom in the crowd, right, Get one hundred comedians in a room and ask them where the hurricane is going to go, and we'll see if on average they're right.
Yeah, and if they bomb, maybe that will I don't know, dissipate the hurricane or something.
Or maybe all the arguing will create a hurricane of shouting or a hurricane of egos.
Or all the groaning from the bad jokes will I don't know, blow a lot of hot air and blow away the storm.
Yeah, but meteorologists are still the butt of jokes about how they can't predict the weather, even though I think they are doing a pretty good job these days.
Yeah.
So weather here on Earth, which is kind of a little bit crazy, sometimes chaotic, a little bit unpredictable still sometimes. So the question is does that happen in other parts of the universe? Is there an equivalent of weather out there in space, maybe in other planets or in between planets, or out there in the galaxies or between galaxies.
And as usual, we're wondering if the patterns we see here on Earth are particular to Earth or if they are universal. This little parochial tribe of humans trying to crack big questions about the universe, having only looked at the way things work on Earth, we're always faced with this question of whether we can take the things we've learned here and generalized to the rest of the universe, or if we live in a really weird, unusual corner and the things that happened here only happen here, like people and ice cream Sundays and all that kind of stuff. So are hurricanes a universal phenomena? Experienced on every planet around the universe, or are they something that space tourists will come to Earth just to experience.
So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what is a space hurricane? So I feel like we're asking like, are there hurricanes in space? Or can you make a hurricane in space? Or what's the equivalent of a hurricane in space? Or all of the above.
It sounds like a pitch for a movie on the Discovery Channel, you know. It sounds like in the category of shark tornado. You know, take two cool words and put them together, right.
Yeah, it's like if the Weather Channel and the Discovery Channel teamed up and made a special movie space hurricane with sharks, space shark Nado Hurricane with dinosaurs in it.
I'm sure somebody in a writer's room has already thought that idea up and discarded it, thank god.
And then you throw like a bachelor in there, and also a home remodeling project, and you've got Emmy Award winning television right there.
Flip your house and get married using a space hurricane filled with sharks. That sounds like.
A great show and dinosaurs. Also, everything can happen here on this show. But yeah, that's an interesting question. What is a space hurricane? And do this sort of relates to that question? We were asking about space weather, like, is there the equivalent of weather out there in space and with all that gas and dust maybe out there floating.
Yeah, And we're interested in whether these patterns we see in hurricanes here on Earth are replicated maybe in other forms, maybe not in water, maybe not in air, maybe in other objects out there in space and other parts of the universe, so that when the aliens come we will have something to talk to them about.
Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of a space hurricane or had any idea of what it is. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet to ask people what is a space hurricane?
So if you live in the wilds of the Internet and you would like to answer random questions I sent you with no opportunity to prepare, please write to me to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
I personally live in the planes of the Internet. It's a lot calm of there. There's no Twitter or Facebook, just a gentle wind of Wikipedia information.
Every time you say the wilds of the Internet It makes me feel like a rugged explorer, risking my life to go out there and gather information in the.
Name of science. You mean reaching out to strangers on the internet is to say these.
Are our listeners. Man, they are nice people, you see.
That's all it takes to be your friend, Daniel. Just be willing to listen to talk about physics.
Absolutely, anybody willing to listen to this podcast is definitely my friend.
All right, Well, think about it for a second. If someone asks you, what is a space hurricane, what would you answer. Here's what people had to say.
I assume it has something to do with well, space weather and possibly solar wind or stellar wind.
I'm not entirely sure. Maybe there's hurricanes. I don't think it would count as a hurricane on the Sun or a hurricane on say Jupiter, because they're not quite space hurricanes. Maybe it's some sort of hurricane to do with the curvature of space, maybe approaching a black hole, something along those lines.
I have no idea what a space hurricane is, but I would have to guess that it has something to do with solar winds.
It sounds like a swirling mass of well, if it's in space, it's probably something like stars or something else with a lot of mass.
When you look at a hurricane and Earth, it sure looks like a galaxy, So maybe a spiral galaxy is a space hurricane.
I can imagine a space hurricane is created by the solar wind, so like there's a big outburst from the Sun that creates space weather, and if it's a really extreme outburst, then it might create a space hurricane. But I can also imagine.
Movement of.
Stuff in space itself might create vortexis or space hurricanes.
Hope you will, all right. I guess it's some pretty interesting answers here. I feel like people sort of thought about a hurricane and what it looks like in pictures that is this swirling massive stuff, and then they try to, I don't know, project them into space, like what would that look like in space or in other planets.
Yeah, it's some great examples of generalization, like this is real physics in action here. I love seeing people take this idea and wonder whether or not it could exist in other forms. Awesome, especially the one about a galaxy being a space hurricane.
Very cool, right, Yeah, is a galaxy technically a space hurricane? Like they look kind of the same as a big flushing toilet or swirling disc. Right, that's kind of what a hurricane is, and that's kind of what a galaxy is.
Yeah, we'll get into it. But a hurricane actually is a low pressure center, right where things flow out from the center, and a galaxy, of course, is very high pressure center. It's really the densest spot with all the forces pulling towards the center of the galaxy. So the mechanisms are something different, but you're right, they do look kind of similar.
It's an anti hurricane.
Maybe it'd be awesome though, to have a hurricane where it's raining stars instead of water droplets.
That's pretty meta, that would be That sounds really dangerous. You would definitely not be a weather man standing there for very long.
Yeah, what kind of hurricane proofing do you need when it's raining stars?
That sounds like another great show on the Discovery slash Weather.
Channel Surviving Extreme Space.
Weather raining stars. But let's get into it then, I guess step us through here, Daniel. First of all, let's tackle one word at a time. So a hurricane, what is that technically here on Earth? Like, how do we get hurricanes and what technically counts as a hurricane, and is that the right name for the weather phenomenon that most people think of when they think of hurricanes.
I was really surprised to learn that you give the name hurricane to this particular type of storm that appears all around the world, but you only call it a hurricane if it appears in particular places in the Atlantic or in the northeastern Pacific. So the most general phrase is a cyclone. It's this kind of storm you get over the water, but you only call it a hurricane in various parts of the world. It's like the naming committee couldn't agree on what to call these things, and so they broke up without like a global agreement for what to call them.
I see now, is this like a convenient naming you know, scheme or is this just like out of the history of how like you know, people who lived here called it a hurricane and people who lived over there call it a time typhoon? You know? Is it like pop and soda and coke? Or is it like you know a scientists where like, okay, we'll call these the ones over here this and the ones that we're there, and we'll call them that.
Now, there's really no difference between a hurricane in the Atlantic, or a typhoon in the Northwest Pacific or a tropical cyclone in the South Pacific. They're fundamentally the same thing. The only thing that differentiates them is where they happen. So the naming convention is just historic. That's what we call those storms. And then I think later people understood in more detail. Oh, these are really all sort of examples of the same thing I see.
But the technical term, the scientific term is actually cyclone.
Yeah exactly, which sounds like a killer robot from the future or something, but it really just describes this sort of spinning storm that you get, which is very typical the kind of storm I think about when I think about a hurricane.
I see, So all hurricanes are cyclones, but not all cyclones.
Are hurricanes, that's right, exactly.
So they're called typhoons in Northwest Pacific and propical cyclones in the South Pacific or Indian Ocean. So what are the basics of this cyclone storm?
So it's the same all around the world, and it's this phenomenon where you have a bunch of really warm water and so the water heats up the air that's above it and moistens it because the water is evaporating from the surface, and then hot air rises, right, and so the hot air rises over this warm spot in the ocean. And because the air is rising, it causes this low pressure center because the air is leaving, so other air sort of has to get sucked in. So it sucks in air from around it, which then rises up. It has to go somewhere and then spreads out. So you get this pattern where air is getting pulled in over the water, rising up and then spreading out. And that's the basics of it. And if the Earth wasn't spinning, the cyclones wouldn't spin either. The way these storms start to spin is just because of the spin of the.
Earth, right, It's due to the cooreol this effect.
Right, that's right. As these winds blow outwards from the center of the storm, they start to curve. And the reason is really cool is because, as you say, it's because of the Coriolis effect. If you are standing on the equator, then you are spinning around the Earth really fast, right, you are going one thousand miles per hour. The surface of the Earth at the equator is moving one thousand miles per hour. The surface of the Earth at the North pole isn't moving at all, right, I mean, you're spinning in place, but you're not actually moving. So what that means is that the closer you are to the equator, the faster you're moving, and the closer you are to the north or South pole, the slower you're moving. That's very cool as sort of to know, but it has an actual effect because if you have air that moves from the equator up towards the poles, then it's moving faster than the air it's encountering, and so it actually sort of drifts. So, for example, if you're in the northern part of the Earth, in the northern hemisphere, air that moves up from the equator towards the north is going faster than the other, so it actually sort of curves to the east. So air that flows north from the equator curves to the east, and air that flows south from the North pole is going too slow to catch up with the air it's encountering, so it sort of flows a little bit to the west. So you get this curving effect just due to the spinning of the Earth.
Right, So then the idea is that the warm air heats up the air above it. That air gets kind of sucked up into the upper atmosphere, and that draws in cold air which comes in with some sort of spin or some sort of kind of skew to it, which then starts kind of the swirl of it. Right, m hm.
And so you can make this mental picture in your mind of air getting pulled towards the hurricane from the south curves to the right, and air coming down from the north also curves to its right. And so everywhere as the air is getting pulled towards the center of this thing is curving towards the right. So then becomes self reinforcing and this whole thing starts to spin. But to me, it's just sort of awesome that you could like prove that the Earth is spinning just by looking at hurricanes.
Right. Or how toilets flush technically? Right, Like you don't need to leave your house, you can just flush the toilet.
I think that's an urban legend, man. I think toilets flush the same way in Australia.
Well, may it depends on how you design the toilet.
Yeah, you're right. If you have a toilet that's like a thousand miles wide, then maybe you're right.
Yeah, that's what I mean, is in your toilet a thousand miles wide.
I don't know what you had for lunch, dude, but just particular needs. That's a spicy hurricane, my friend. But the amazing thing is that in the Southern hemisphere storms really do spin the other way because the same effect works the opposite way in the southern hemisphere. So if the air is flowing from the equator towards the south, then it's going faster than the air it's encountering. But now it's going to spin the other direction. Right, it's going to spin sort of two. It's left. The same deal. If air is coming from the south pull up towards the equator, right, then it's going slower than the air that's spinning. It's going to curve to the left, and so you get storms spinning the other way in the southern hemisphere. I think this is super awesome.
Yeah, that's pretty cool, And so I guess maybe a quick question is like what happens to all that air getting sucked up. Does it just go up to the upper atmosphere and then dissipates or does it recycle? Kind of down and then helps to feed that hurricane.
Yeah, so you're right, the cold air gets sucked in and then it rises and then it flows out in this sort of big shield. And that's what you see sort of from the space if you're looking at this hurricane, that you get this like big spinning shield that sort of spins out away from the hurricane. And so that's what these sort of these arms are. Like there's these clouds and condensation formed from the air flowing away from the center of the hurricane and the upper atmosphere.
So a hurricane is actually like a three D thing. It's not just a swirl like the air and the bottom is swirling inwards, but the air and the upper atmosphere is swirling outwards.
Mm hmm, yeah exactly. And so it's this machine and it's all by the energy from the ocean. And so that's why as the Earth warms up and we get more hot spots and hotter spots in the ocean, we get more and more dramatic hurricanes.
And I guess it's due to these currents too, because I guess you need warm water under cold air, right, So like as the warm water, you know, moves under cold air. Then it creates these low pressure points.
Mm hmm exactly. It warms up the air and the air rises, and then you get this low pressure center. So you know, in general, the idea of hurricane is this flow, this cyclic flow of the air and this low pressure center.
All right, well, let's get into whether or not something like that can happen out in outer space, maybe in other planets or in our galaxy. But first let's take a quick break.
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Right, we're talking about space hurricanes and whether or not those are actually a thing. I guess they are a thing. Daniel if we're asking the question what is a space hurricane? So it must be a thing, right.
It'd be a short podcast if we were just saying.
No, you can tell it, because otherwise we would have titled this episode do space hurricanes exist? Right? But here we are asking what is a space hurgan? So I think we spoil a little bit. They do exist, there are a thing. But I guess the question is how does that happen? How do you get a hurricane in space?
Yes, so this basic mechanism that we're talking about can exist in other places, other places where you have something like air that can flow, and then you have some sources of energy to like pump into that to create this low pressure center. And so you have lots of places actually in the Solar System we know about it, and then probably in the rest of the universe where you get similar structures that are forming not necessarily out of air and water droplets. But the structure of a hurricane turns out to be something we see all.
Over the place, really not necessarily with water, but maybe with other kinds of storms.
Yeah, exactly, with other kinds of storms. You know, around the Solar system, we have atmospheres with methane and all sorts of other crazy stuff in them. And so we can take the same idea of a hurricane and use it to understand storms on other planets or moons.
I guess the other planets are spinning and they have some kind of atmosphere, so why not, right, they could have.
Hurricanes too, Yeah, exactly, But wait.
Don't you need the oceans too, like the moving oceans and currents and things like that.
Well, you really just need sort of like bands, right. You don't necessarily need an ocean. You just need something underneath it to provide the energy, something to power this thing. And so you know, you could have like hot rocks or other bands of denser gases. You don't necessarily need a liquid ocean of water.
You don't need like the moving currents of water, right, Because that's kind of why hurricanes move, isn't it, or is it just due to the weather?
Well, motion of the hurricanes on other planets will see is a little bit different than it is on Earth. That they don't necessarily crash into shores the way they do on Earth. But they're definitely formed and they can be a lot more stable. Sometimes, these storms on other planets can last for hundreds of years.
All right, Well, step us through here. What are some of the interesting hurricane type of storms that we see in other planets?
Well, sort of the most boring are the ones on our neighbor planet Mars. Mars does have big storms on it, and we don't understand them exactly how they work, But we have seen cyclones on Mars. Mostly these things are dust storms, and they're not as dramatic as the hurricanes on Earth, mostly because the atmosphere on Mars is just a lot lower pressure. You know, there's just not that much atmosphere, so you don't get as many dramatic events. Like the winds in storms on Mars blow up to maybe one hundred kilometers per hour, which is not nearly as dramatic as hurricanes here on Earth.
It's sort of like a slow motion, mild kind of hurricane.
Yeah, exactly. But we are watching the atmosphere of Mars pretty carefully. We have a lot of satellites in orbit around it. And in April of nineteen ninety nine, scientists saw this huge cyclone near the north pole of Mars. It was eleven hundred miles wide, It had these big cloud bands and it spun around and it dissipated after several hours.
It was the Mars Santa Claus who was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, hurricane here in Mars.
Yeah, and it's not something that we have seen since. And we are watching the Martian atmosphere, so it's something we're looking to understand because we're always wanting to get a better understanding of what's in the atmosphere of Mars and what the dynamics of it are. But you know, the same basic idea. You know, something must have heated up the sete center of this thing to create the rising air from the center, which flew outwards and then spun because of the spinning of Mars.
What about other planets have we seen cyclones in like Saturn?
We have Saturn, of course has an amazing storm. There's this storm on its north pole which is in the shape of a hexagon. We did a whole fun podcast episode about like what is going on there? How do you get a hexagon shaped storm on the north pole of Saturn that's been there for a long time and it's like twenty five thousand kilometers wide, So like this thing is a monster, but not just its north Pole. It has these spots on it that are these like massive planets circling storms. They don't last that long, but they can impact the atmosphere and the temperature of the planet for quite a while. So there are these great white spots on Saturn the scientists think have the same fundamental mechanisms as hurricanes here on Earth.
Interesting now, because I guess Saturn is sort of a gas planet, right, It's mostly gas, and so it must have all kinds of currents and layers of gas swirling and bands and things like that exactly.
And so you have these layers, and so when a deeper layer has a hot spot in it, it can create a low pressure center in the band above it, right, which creates exactly the same effect as we see here on Earth. And so we don't understand a lot of the mechanisms of the internals of Saturn, mostly because we haven't had a chance to probe it. Remember Cassini did its like death dive into Saturn and give us some measurements about what was going on inside of it. But mostly Saturn has been unexplored, so we have to just observe it from the outside. And that's why asking these questions like do we understand how the storms form? Do we understand the mechanisms of it? Can we extrapolate from the things we have learned on Earth. Is a really good way to try to build a model of what's going on in Saturn, so we can ask if it makes sense or if there are surprises inside.
Hmmm. Interesting, Now I hear that Saturn has a record for the longest continuous storm in the Solar SYSTEMA.
That's right, not necessarily just a hurricane, but there was a thunderstorm on Saturn that lasted for over eight months. Cassini observed it back in two thousand and nine, and we measured the strength of this thunderstorm by measuring the radio emissions from its lightning. Right, every time you have a thunderstorm, you have lightning, and lightning, of course, is an electromagnetic phenomena, which means it creates radiation. I mean, what you're seeing is radiation from the lightning. So there's also radiation in other frequencies of light, including the radio, so you can detect thunderstorms in radio waves. That's why it interferes with radio, of course, and this one was ten thousand times stronger than storms we see here on Earth and lasted for eight months, so it's pretty dramatic. So really hunker down if you're in a storm on Saturn.
I guess technically that wasn't a cyclone. It was just a big thunderstorm, like clouds crashing into each other.
Yeah, exactly, that was not a cyclone.
All right. What about the big guy in our Solar system, Jupiter? That must have a lot of cyclones because it's a big gas.
Giant exactly for the same reason, and it has the biggest cyclones humanity has ever discovered. And the Great Red Spot is basically a hurricane. This thing. We did a whole episode about it. Remember, it's been seen by astronomers for hundreds of years, and so we know that this storm is at least a three hundred and fifty years old. It also boasts the fastest winds in the Solar System, and so this is essentially a huge hurricane on another planet. It's visible from.
Earth, right, and it's read for some reason. Right, We talked about it in a podcast episode.
Yeah, although it's a really fun mystery, and so dig into that whole episode if you're curious about why the Great Red Spot is red and also why the Great Red Spot is shrinking.
Yeah, check that out please. And something else interesting about Jupiter is that it has a lot of cyclones, but they're not regular cyclones.
Yeah, Jupiter turns out has cyclones, but mostly it has anti cyclones. Anti cyclones are not like anti matter. It's not like if a cyclone meets an anti cyclone, they annihilate. Cyclone that has the opposite sort of structure because it has a high pressure center instead of a low pressure center, and so the winds actually go the opposite direction. Like on Earth, if you have a cyclone in the northern hemisphere, it spins counterclockwise. If you had an anti cyclone in the northern hemisphere, it would spin clockwise, and so on Jupiter, most of these things are actually anti cyclones.
Interesting meaning like it's a high pressure center somehow, like maybe the bottom layer is colder and then that pushes air away somehow.
Yeah, it would have to have like the air sinking in the center exactly, like if you have a cold spot, then it's pulling the air in and sinking it down towards the center, and so that creates a pawner of winds and it also spins again because of the spinning of Jupiter. So again, this is something that's like on the forefront of our knowledge. Space meteorologists and planetary scientists are trying to understand the dynamics of Jupiter's atmosphere. And that's a tough thing to do from so far away with very limited instruments. So it's a tough science. Yeah.
I can't imagine. It's hard enough here to monitor the weather. Imagine doing it millions of miles away. All right, Well, what about other planets in the Solar System? What other interesting cyclones can we find?
Yeah, Neptune has a great dark spot. It seems like on other planets we call these things spots, right, I guess, just because that's what they look like from space. But I feel like it under sells them. It makes it feel like a stain in your laundry instead of this like mammoth atmospheric event with incredible power and destructiveness. But Neptune has a great dark spot. It must have spilled coffee on itself or something. And it features winds of fifteen hundred miles per hour and it rotates around the planet every eighteen hours or so. This thing in the southern hemisphere of Neptune is the same size as the Earth.
Wow, that's crazy, Like you could fit the Earth inside of the storm.
I know.
And it's sort of like the unloved cousin of the Great Red Spot, because the Great Red Spot's pretty big, but it's not that much bigger than the Great Dark Spot. The Great Red Spot's like one hundred and thirty percent the size of the Earth, so it's only a little bit bigger. But nobody talks about the Great Dark Spot and all the destruction it's achieved.
Do you feel like the Earth maybe this feeling left out? Like maybe the Earth wish it had a tattoo, just like Jupiter and Neptune.
I don't think we wish the Earth had any big spots like that who plowed throughout civilization.
Well, I guess there it does have a big stain on it. It's called humans.
Just kidding, looking forward to that movie a Human Hurricane.
All right, Well, what about some of the other planets, anything in our inner Solar System?
Yeah, So Mercury actually has a really really thin atmosphere, so there aren't really storms to speak of in terms of winds, but it has a crazy magnetic field and Also it's very close to the Sun, it interacts with its magnetic field, and so it has these things called magnetic tornadoes, which are so sort of related.
What.
Yeah, you get these bundles of magnetic fields and magnetic field line can twist and eventually, when there's too much strain on them, they can snap and then like realign. And so this sort of causes something similar because these magnetic fields push charged particles, and when they spin and twist, they can push particles sort of in a circular pattern, and so you get these magnetic tornadoes where it's sort of like you know the Northern lights, which are just charged particles moving around magnetic fields, except you get these sort of spinning patterns of the charge particles on mercury.
WHOA, but you called that one a tornado. That's different than a maybe a cyclone or a hurricane.
Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have like the same sort of low pressure center. It's just this sort of like sheer effect that's creating this spinning due to the magnetic fields, I guess. And you have the same sort of thing happening actually on the Sun. On the Sun, you have these like really huge towers of plasma being ejected from the center and all these tangled magnetic fields because you have these charged particles moving really fast, which gives you magnetic fields, and so you get these huge towers with tangled magnetic fields, and sometimes those magnetic fields get strained and then they snap and realign and you get the same sort of effect. These are called solar tornadoes, but they don't actually spin. People thought for a long time these things also spun and give you these like weird patterns. But they're just these sort of like long towers of plasma that are like several times the size of the Earth.
So they're not spinning, but they are maybe swirling, right, that's what makes us call them tornadoes.
Yeah, I don't think they're even swirling. I think people thought for a while they might be swirling, and they applied this phrase solar tornadoes to them before they understood that they're not spinning. And then later measurements show that they don't actually rotate. So probably they should be downgraded from solar tornado to just like solar massive tower of plasma, but they still have the name.
I don't know which one has a better movie like a name power giant tower of doom or solar tornado. All right, well that's on the planets and in our solar system. Now let's talk about possible hurricanes in actual space, because I feel like these are hurricanes, but they're in other planets, so they're technically not in space. I mean there's space relative to us, but not too like Saturn in Jupiter.
M M.
Yeah, they're sort of extraterrestrial hurricanes.
All right, Well let's get into actual hurricanes in space. But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're trying to come up with the next great movie for the Discovery Channel and the Weather Channel. Daniel, any interesting names that we come up with. In the break dark Matter typhoon.
Daniel and Jorge get eaten by dark matter.
Sharks, but then it gets saved by regular matter dinosaurs.
Why would regular matter dinosaurs come and save us? They're still mad that we took over the planet when the asteroid hit. They left it to us.
Come on, it could just be the you know, vegetarian dinosaurs.
I think those died out pretty quick. Yep, you got to eat a lot of salad if you're a dinosaur. Let me tell you.
All right, Well, let's get into weather or not we can have weather in space. I think we had an episode about weather in space, but this one today we're talking specifically about hurricanes in space.
Space weather in general mostly refers to what the Sun is doing, because the Sun generates a solar wind, which is a stream of particles. Right, the Sun is not just a ball of plasma that generates heat and photon. It also shoots out protons and electrons and all sorts of other stuff, neutrinos, all sorts of stuff, the products of the fusion going on at its center. And that solar wind is important. And if you're out there in space, like you're a satellite, you have to be careful because these things are like tiny bullets and they can shred your electronics. And because the Sun is unpredictable, solar weather is unpredictable, and like a solar storm leading to a solar flare can really inundate our delicate electronics with all sorts of particles. But what we're talking about today is actually something quite different. It's a space hurricane, you're right, is not the product of solar weather, but actually something that's happening in the very very upper atmosphere of Earth.
So it's actually more like near space weather, almost space weather. It's like right on the border between Earth and space.
Yeah, exactly, it's like near Earth space. But you see this sort of same structure that we're familiar with now of a hurricane, where we have this like low pressure center and things rising and then of course the spinning effect. And this is a fascinating study from a university in China. This is done by Shengdong University in China, and they actually observed a hurricane over the Earth's magnetic north pole. We're talking about really really far up in the very upper atmosphere of Earth where we have mostly just like charged particles whizzing around, So basically where the atmosphere becomes plasma, you know, where it's like protons and electrons whizzing around in space.
Oh wow, there's not a lot of air there, or is this plasma made from air.
This plasma is made from air, but also you know, like this is where the solar wind hits the outer atmosphere, and so a lot of the air molecules get ionized when the solar wind hits them, and so what you have up there's a lot more charged particles than you have down here on Earth. What they saw was this thing they call a space hurricane because you have this circulation, but instead of in air with water droplets, it's in plasma, and the precipitation are electrons. So this is a space hurricane in plasma raining electrons.
What raining electricity?
Basically, yeah, exactly, not like lightning.
Right.
Electricity is like the motion of energy through electrons. Right as energy gets passed along a chain of electrons. Here, the electrons themselves are actually shooting going really really fast up to like ten thousand kila electron bolts, which is like not nearly as fast as we have the large hadron collider, but it's a huge, massive number of electrons. So these things get pulled up and then rain back down.
Now this is like different than the Northern lights, right, Like this is different than what's going on with the solar wind. Hitting the atmosphere. This is like stuff that's happening with the ions and the electrons that are already floating above the Earth.
Yeah, this is a complex interaction of the plasma at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and the magnetic fields and how the earth magnetic fields interact with the other magnetic fields around us. Right, Like, we have our own magnetic field, and then there's the Sun's magnetic field and the magnetic fields of all the other objects that we're sort of flying through, and our magnetic field lines sort of like add up with those magnetic field lines to make a total magnetic field. But because we're moving through that magnetic field, it gets complicated and these magnetic field lines sort of snap and rearrange sometimes, and that creates this central vortex. It's like spinning magnetic fields, very similar to these magnetic tornadoes we talked about on mercury. And the net effect is that it accelerates electrons upwards. It pulls them up so effectively it makes a low pressure region at the center where it's low pressure in terms of like fewer electrons are there.
And so then the other electrons around rush in and then that creates a swirl.
That's exactly it. So the other electrons rush in and then everything rises up. In this case, it's powered by this magnetic field vortex instead of like you know, warm ocean waters, but the structure is the same. And that's the thing I find really fascinating that this basic mechanism of a hurricane, you see it in lots of different places. As long as you have these basic ingredients, you know, something to power it, create a low pressure center, and then on a spinning planet, you'll end up with this spinning effect. And that's exactly what they see. But these are not that common. And so this one, this particular storm was seen in twenty fourteen with satellite observations. There this awesome device called the Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager or SUSI to its friends, Sassy or SUSI. I'll let you decide how to pronounce it. I'm not sure how the scientists who work on it pronounce it.
So this was somebody took a picture of this space hurricane with plasma and raining electrons. They took a picture of it with a satellite.
Yeah, exactly, because it radiates right anytime you have charged particles accelerating, they radiate photons, and so we can see this. Anywhere in the universe electrons are being bent or accelerated, they will give off photons, and this is a great way to see like how particles are moving through space and what's going on. So this satellite detects in the ultraviolet the radiation of these electrons trapped in this space hurricane, and so they were able to see it. And so if you google Space Hurricane, you can see this awesome picture of really this spinning vortex and it's got these lines and everything. But it's sort of similar to the Northern lights right in that these are charge particles that are moving along magnetic field lines and they are giving off radiation. But instead of just being these long bands, it really is this spiral with various arms.
WHOA, did you see it with the naked eye or is it that you could only see it with this satellite.
You definitely couldn't see it from the surface. I don't know if it gave off radiation in the visible light, but it was definitely strongest in the UV. And I think that's because these very high energy electrons. It's a very high frequency radiation.
I guess The question is why did they call it a space hurricane and not a space typhoon or space cyclone? Is it because it's technically in the northern hemisphere.
I think space hurricane just has the right ring to it, right. Hurricane just sounds more dramatic than typhoon or cyclone.
Space cyclone, cosmic cyclone. You see that extra oop.
You should have been in the room pitching these ideas. So this thing is pretty awesome. It's one thousand kilometers wide. It's not something that happens very often. This one about eight hours before it dissipated, and we haven't seen another one, and so it's something scientists are on the lookout for because we're looking to understand, like are these hurricanes really universal phenomena? Do they exist all over the universe in various kinds of forms, in water, in methane, in electrons. That's really fascinating to know that we could like take our knowledge of what's happening here on Earth and use it to understand the weather on other planets around other stars.
Interesting, like if it can happen here, it can happen in other places, and you know the way it happens, it can maybe tell us about what's going on in those layers of clouds and gases and other planets.
Because we spend a lot of energy right now trying to understand hurricanes, not just because we want to predict them so that we can keep people safe because we know where they're going to land, but because they're an example of something that's really difficult to talk about, really difficult to calculate. You talked earlier in the podcast at the very beginning about chaos, and they're a great example of chaos. Like we understand the basic rules of everything that goes on inside a hurricane. There's no mystery there, there's no like magic happening. It's all just water droplets and air moving. But it's still very difficult to predict when a hurricane will form and what it will do because it's very very sensitive to tiny little details. A small change and how it started can mean a big change and where it landed, and that makes it difficult to handle for our computers. So some of the most powerful computers in the world right now are spending their cycles trying to understand what's going on inside a hurricane. It's a great example of a chaos problem. You know, even if particle physicists solve string theory, it doesn't mean we could predict where hurricanes will land. It's sort of like a problem at a different scale. So if we can figure this kind of stuff out, if we spend our energy understanding hurricanes here on Earth, it might very well help us understand weather on alien planets.
You mean, like if you get good at modeling how gases and liquids and fluids basically work, right, and what they can do, and we can predict how they're going to move together.
That's right. We need a string theory of hurricanes.
Or you can string together a theory of hurricanes.
As long as we don't get a string of hurricanes that would be pretty dangerous.
Just take that sharpie and move them out of the way. All right, Well, that's pretty cool. Space hurricanes, they do happen in other planets and also in the upper atmosphere. Now, Daniel, I guess a question we sort of asked at the beginning was, you know, can this same phenomenon happen out there in like outer space, like between stars, between galaxies. You know, if you have like a cloud of gas and dust, can it form a hurricane?
Maybe?
Out there in space.
I suppose it's possible. You know, you need some sort of energy source that can create like a low pressure region. But we do have big clouds of gas and dust out there, and they're heated by supernova and all sorts of other stuff, and so in the dynamics of those turbulent clouds there potentially could be hurricanes forming.
Right, or cyclones, space cyclones.
Whatever you want to call them. They're awesome in their destructive power.
All right, Well as O keep an eye on the weather because it can tell us a lot about Earth, about physics, about gases and ions, and just help us a little bit more understand how things work in the universe.
And I find it heartening to know that the things we learn here on Earth can be translated to other places in the Solar System and other places in the universe. That human science, all of our knowledge, might help us crack problems on other planets.
Then we'll know whether to bring an umbrella or not to Saturn. Earn Neptune.
Definitely bring an umbrella.
And a spacesuit made out of diamonds, hopefully. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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