The Universe s02e15 Episode Script

ln the beginning, there was darkness and then, bang giving birth to an endless expanding existence of time, space, and matter.
Now, see further than we've ever imagined beyond the limits of our existence in a place we call "The Universe.
" What ifthe forecast predicted high winds ten times the speed of sound? An evening downpour of sulfuric acid rain or a hurricane two times the size of Earth lasting 300 years? This is not the stuff of a science fiction movie.
These are actual weather reports from around the universe and it's Earth's weather to the extreme.
We are counting down some of the biggest, baddest weirdest, and wildest weather the universe creates.
Fasten your seatbelts.
lt's going to be a bumpy ride.
This is "The Universe: Wildest Weather in the Cosmos.
" Weather is the state of an atmosphere.
We might thinkwe've got it bad on the third planet from the Sun with vicious thunderstorms oppressive heat and temperatures so low, they're sometimes unbearable.
But weather here is a walk in the park compared to weather elsewhere in the universe.
Rain, wind, and storms take on a whole new and strange meaning.
And while the mechanics that power these weather events are strangely similar to Earth's the results are terrifying to contemplate.
lt's 900 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus hotter than a pizza oven every day.
Mars is bone-dry and colder than ice-cold.
You've got lightning you've got storms.
All those weather phenomena are ultimately driven by the fact that the temperature differences created by uneven input of sunlight are going to cause motions in the atmosphere.
Perhaps the answers to Earth's ultimate fate lie in the great unknown of space.
And we are counting down the most extreme weather the universe has to offer.
You want to learn about which way our planet can turn climatically? Have a look at some neighboring planets within our own solar system.
Scientists know all weather starts with one thing: Heat.
Heat is a catalyst that creates winds.
And there are winds on other planets unlike anything Mother Earth has ever seen.
Jupiter is a monster planet.
lfyou add up all the planets together theywould not total the gigantic planet called Jupiter.
Jupiter is the planetary amusement park when it comes to windy conditions.
Jet streams on Jupiter are pretty cool.
Here on Earth, we, roughly speaking have about onejet stream per hemisphere.
Jupiter's different.
Jupiter has about thirtyjet streams.
These are associated with the cloud bands.
Jupiter"sjet streams rip around the planet running in opposite directions.
Defined by different colors invisible on its surface thesejet streams tear around Jupiter"s astounding Earth, in comparison, has only a fewjet streams and an atmosphere only100 miles thick.
But why so manyjet streams, and why winds at all on a planet that doesn't even get a quarter ofthe sunlight as Earth? One theory suggests these winds are a direct result ofthis hot planet just trying to cool itself off.
Jupiter is a huge planet, over 300 Earth masses.
And it formed with a huge, huge amount of heat.
And it's so big that it's still trying to get rid of this heat offormation.
This constant release of heat slowly rises into Jupiter"s atmosphere and collides with cooler air.
Like Earth and her need to balance hot and cold streams of air in high and low-pressure systems Jupiter also struggles for normalcy.
That energy band is used to drive the various storms and winds in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.
Thejet streams on Jupiter are really ferocious.
They go at several hundred miles per hour and there's a lot of gas zipping along this stream.
But unlike on Earth, thejet streams are pretty stable.
On Earth, it's rare for surface winds to reach over 200 miles per hour.
Jet streams on Jupiter reach speeds exceeding up to about 300 miles per hour.
That's really fast.
And you can't get out.
You're trapped inside thejet stream.
Traveling through Jupiter's equatorial jet stream would be like a roller coaster ride from hell.
lt's like this continuous, never-ending roller coaster ride.
l love it! What a thrill! You would be pushed up and down by up to a hundred miles.
- This is huge.
- Oh, man.
lt would lead to a much greater change in pressure than going from the Earth's surface up to the top of Mount Everest.
Jupiter'sjet streams are pretty impressive but 300 miles per hour is nothing compared to our next planet.
At first glance, Neptune is the last place scientists expect to find wild weather, let alone vicious winds.
Heat is not in abundance on this chilly planet.
Neptune is frigid, frigid cold.
Neptune only absorbs 0.
1 percent ofthe sunlight that Earth does.
Up until 1989, Neptune was considered, well, boring.
Sitting far away from the Sun and having an orbit of165 years scientists didn't believe much was to be discovered on the blue planet.
A visit from Voyager ll changed all that.
As the orbiter zoomed past the planet scientists were shocked to discover traces of clouds.
Most surprising, these clouds were traveling around Neptune at ferocious speeds.
Something was carrying them.
But wind, so far away from the Sun? Neptune is the windiest planet in the solar system.
Winds blow on the surface of Neptune over1,000 miles per hour.
lmagine that, breaking the sound barrier every time you simply look up and the winds blow past you.
Scientists estimate winds reach up to 1,500 miles per hour depending on weather conditions and storms that develop.
A major unsolved puzzle in our solar system is the fact that the wind speeds on Neptune are actually much faster than those on Jupiter despite the fact that Neptune receives only maybe four percent of the sunlight that Jupiter does.
This lack of sunlight or heat completely contradicts what scientists know about howwinds develop here on Earth.
You might think that the stronger the sunlight the stronger the winds would be.
This is obviously not true when comparing Earth to Neptune since Earth's winds are typically maybe thirty miles per hour whereas those on Neptune reach 900 miles per hour.
Scientists suspect there is internal heat left over from Neptune's formation billions ofyears ago but are perplexed how this internal heat could be enough to drive winds to this speed.
There's twice as much heat getting out of Neptune as what the Sun is putting in.
However, that's not enough to explain the tremendous winds of Neptune.
And science has come up with another hypothesis for Neptune's racing winds.
A lack offriction might allow these winds to fly uninhibited around the planet.
We can be very thankful that there's friction on Earth.
Friction comes about when the winds are banging into things like trees and buildings and terrain like mountains so friction ends up slowing down the winds.
Like other gas giants, Neptune has no solid surface.
Even though the sunlight is extremelyweak ifthe friction is also extremely weak then you can build up very fast winds over time.
Neptune's winds are the most impressive in our solar system but the universe is a big place.
And what is a champion here pales in comparison to weatherfurther out in space.
Perhaps the most exciting discovery in planetary science are the most amazing winds we could hope to never experience.
lfyou want to experience the wildest winds in the cosmos then hot Jupiters are your destination.
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets.
lt's definitely not a place you want to be.
lt's much, much worse than Neptune.
lt's much hotter.
The winds are much faster.
So, ifyou want a nice kind of calm place to set up shop you'd probably be better off going with Neptune.
These guys are definitely much, much worse.
Hot Jupiters orbit tightly around their stars far closer than Mercury to our own Sun.
And all that intense heat makes for some wild weather.
For comparison, it gets about from its star than Jupiter does from the Sun.
The temperatures on these planets are enormous between 1,500 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more.
Some hot Jupiters are tidally locked a gravitational effect that leads them to show the same face to their star at all times.
You've got one side of this planet that's being just blasted with light from the star all the time.
So you would expect that to be very, very hot.
But at the same time, you've got this night side ofthe planet that never sees any light from the star.
So, you know, perhaps that night side is actually quite cold.
Taking hot Jupiters' temperatures scientists measured how much light is eclipsed from the planet as it passes in front of and behind its star during its orbit.
So they actually glow relatively brightly at infrared wavelength.
So ifyou want to take the temperature of a planet you want to look at these infrared wavelengths.
You want to measure the heat that they're giving off.
But the temperature difference between the day side and night side is virtually the same.
This was astounding, considering the extreme situation.
Something was transferring the heat from the day side to the night side.
But what? Winds traveling at amazing speeds were the answer.
And so our models tell us that the winds could be as fast as maybe 6,000 miles per hour.
The 6,000-mile-per-hourwinds inferred on some hot Jupiters is much faster than any winds that we know of in our solar system.
Howfast is 6,000 miles per hour? At that speed, you could travel fom NewYork to Los Angeles in twenty minutes.
You've got this incredibly hot day side.
And so you've got all this hot gas sitting there on the day side and sort ofwhat it wants to do is to kind of go rushing around to the night side.
Winds are created by hot air wanting to travel to the cold side of the planet.
So it's a little bit like a windsurfer.
lfyou come out here on a windy day and you put your sail up you can really catch a good breeze and you can go flying across the harbor.
lt's the same thing with these planets.
You have such incredibly strong winds that they can really just pick that gas up and whip it all the way around to the night side before it even cools off at all.
lt's hard to beat weather like that.
Six thousand-mile-an-hourwinds is about as crazy as you can get with a planet.
Scientists have learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to weather in space.
Sometimes winds become storms like tornadoes.
And galactic tornadoes are unpredictable and behave in ratherweird ways.
Recently, a tornado of epic proportions was discovered in space.
This space tornado is a Herbig-Haro object created by winds as the result of a forming star.
A Herbig-Haro object is a glowing cloud of gas produced when a high-speed jet of gas smashes into surrounding, essentially, stationary gas.
So this high-speed jet heats the stationary gas and causes it to glow.
This object would easily be number one on the list ofwildest tornadoes in the universe except for one important fact.
lt's not actually a tornado.
lts shape is very suggestive of a tornado.
lt has this helical shape to it that looks like it is twisting along but it's actually not a rotating object like a tornado.
Unlike a tornado on Earth where a vortex ofwind creates a conical shape this tornado is created by magnetic forces creating a wake of cosmic dust and particles.
This one appears to have sort of a spiral shape within it.
And that's really kind ofweird because most of the others really don't have the spiral pattern.
But the cause of the spin is probably different from that of a tornado on Earth.
Number two on the galactic tornado list is much more like tornadoes we find at home and it's a towering presence.
They're called dust devils and they are Mars' answer to a planetary tornado.
Dust storms on Mars are pretty cool.
There are thousands of local storms that occur every Mars year meaning dust clouds that are opaque and maybe tens to hundreds of miles across and a few miles tall.
Often referred to as the Red Planet Mars is a dusty and dismal place.
lts surface is covered by sand.
Apparently, there is no liquid water on the surface.
And in this dusty terrain, when the Sun rises, trouble starts.
Dust devils can be hundreds ofyards wide and half a mile or more tall spinning seventy miles an hour across the surface and they have similarities to Earth's own tornadoes.
As far as the basic forces inside a dust devil they're pretty similar to in a tornado.
They're both thin vortices that rotate and are low-pressure centers.
Yet a tornado is much, much stronger often by an order of magnitude in wind speed.
The power of a tornado is undeniable.
And scientists at lowa State University can't seem to get enough of these violent storms.
Here they have built the largest tornado simulator in the world to understand vortex formation.
Understanding the power of a tornado on a small scale here might lead scientists to understand these beasts on a grander or even galactic scale.
Scientists use dry ice and packing peanuts to observe vortex behavior.
We have a six-foot-diameterfan on top of me, as you can see which produces the suction.
And the flow goes up and comes through the outer duct and it's rotating.
And then the flow converges to the center and again goes up.
And as it's going up it produces the vortex of a certain size, which we can control.
Combined, these elements perfectly mimic the formation of a vortex as it swells from its base and grows to a funnel.
Scientists know that, just like tornadoes on Earth dust devils form from the ground up.
Sunlight comes down and heats up the surface and that heat needs to be convected away by hot blobs of air.
As these hot blobs move away from the surface, air is drawn in.
And just like an ice skater pulling in her arms that air spins up, moving faster and faster and with those higher speeds kicks dust up into the atmosphere.
As this hot blob of air moves away from the surface the dust devil will become taller and stronger reaching altitudes of several hundred meters or more and widths of typically a hundred meters and will get stronger as dust continues to be injected into its interior.
And then, the dust devil will move off into the distance.
However, if a future space colonist was trapped in a Mars dust devil it wouldn't be fatal.
The atmosphere on Mars is very thin so the wind could be blowing on you, and you'd barely feel it.
The pressure on you would be relatively low so you're not going to say, "Oh, what was that? "l just got bowled over by a dust devil.
" That's not going to happen.
The final galactic tornado event on the countdown is a true mystery.
And it turns theories behind tornado formation upside down.
The final tornado on the countdown is double trouble.
Venus, once viewed as a romantic planet has some truly horrific weather conditions.
Oppressive heat with a greenhouse effect gone amok this is one planet that is constantly trying to cool itself off with no success.
Venus is a fascinatingly hostile place.
lt's so hostile that even our machines that we send there they work for, like, a few minutes, and then the components melt.
As a result ofthis constant heat, storms are always present on Venus and this makes for one ofthe most interesting vortex events ever observed.
There's a giant, upside down, twin tornado permanently existing at the pole ofVenus.
Ever since the Venus Express Orbiter sent back magnificent images ofVenus scientists have struggled to understand the twin vortexes running upside down at her south polar region.
ln a sense, it's an upside down tornado because the air is funneling from the top part of that spiral down towards the ground whereas a typical tornado on Earth you think of the air kind of rising up through the funnel.
And the strange thing is that it's a double vortex.
That is, picture two giant tornadoes sort of rotating around each other.
And you can see the two lobes, the two halves of it here.
Scientists believe the vortexes are a result of heat transfer in the atmosphere.
Heat rises atVenus' equator then sinks at the coolest section of the planet.
Like a bathtub draining, where the water is-- That flow is concentrated on the drain and it leads to this spinning motion.
Why it's a double vortex, we don't really understand that.
lt's still mysterious.
This storm is an enormous presence on Venus.
lt's thousands of miles across.
The winds it generates are hundreds of miles an hour and these vortexes are a permanent fixture on Venus.
Weather takes many strange forms in space But other planets have atmospheres