NASA's Juno mission reveals secrets about Jupiter, a strange world that is more like a star than a planet. Learning what lies beneath the planet's violent storms provides scientists with a new understanding of the Solar System.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Jupiter, our largest planetary neighbor.
00:06Jupiter is the king of the planets for a good reason.
00:09It's the biggest, it's the baddest.
00:11It dominated the evolution of the solar system.
00:14Jupiter is a violent world of radiation and storms on an epic scale.
00:20The interior of Jupiter is kind of hard to imagine.
00:23There may be a layer inside Jupiter where you get diamond rain.
00:28Today, NASA's Juno mission is unraveling Jupiter's deepest secrets.
00:34What forces shape its mysterious storms and cause volcanic eruptions that jet lava deep into space?
00:43Jupiter actually has more in common with our sun than it does with any of the other planets in the solar system.
00:49We venture deep inside the most extreme planet in the solar system to reveal its inner secrets.
00:57and investigate if Jupiter could actually be the sun's secret twin.
01:03Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in the solar system.
01:21Made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, Jupiter stretches more than 85,000 miles across.
01:33It's unfathomably big. You know, you can fit a thousand Earths inside.
01:40Jupiter is a beast of a planet. It's 317 times the mass of the Earth.
01:45It has individual storms on it that could contain the entire Earth.
01:51Now, scientists have launched a mission to study Jupiter in more detail than ever before.
01:57Juno is orbiting this oversized world, snapping close-up images and collecting data.
02:09Scientists are uncovering the secrets of an extraordinarily complex and unique world.
02:15Jupiter has 67 known moons and probably a giant number of ones that are not yet known.
02:21It's like a miniature solar system all of its own. It's a whole environment, a whole ecosystem.
02:27It has enormous magnetic fields. It has intense radiation.
02:31No matter which way you cut it, Jupiter stands in a class on its own.
02:37The conditions on and around Jupiter are extreme.
02:41It doesn't behave like an ordinary planet.
02:45Formed at the beginning of the solar system, from the same stuff as the sun, Jupiter is an enigma.
02:55Is it hiding a secret history? Could Jupiter be a star in disguise?
03:12Spread across 50 square miles of baking sand in the scorching Mojave Desert,
03:19these giant telescopes listen for radio signals in outer space.
03:26NASA's Steve Levin is on the front line unlocking the secrets of Jupiter.
03:32We've known about Jupiter for thousands of years,
03:35and we've studied it with telescopes for hundreds of years.
03:38In fact, Jupiter was one of the very first objects in the sky that was studied with telescopes.
03:42But when we started using radio telescopes, we learned a lot of surprises about Jupiter.
03:48These telescopes observe space by looking at radio waves rather than visible light.
03:54And the radio waves that come from Jupiter aren't what scientists expect to see from a planet.
04:00One of the surprises was this enormous bright radio source that turned out to be Jupiter.
04:05Jupiter gives off a huge radio signal far too bright for its size.
04:11It's the largest magnetic field of any planet in our solar system by far.
04:23So what is causing Jupiter's huge magnetic field?
04:27Scientists believe the answer might lie with an alien chemistry deep within the planet.
04:45More than 300 million miles from Earth, Jupiter is an unimaginably different world.
04:57It's a planet that astronomers call a gas giant.
05:02It's made almost entirely from hydrogen, the same material that forms stars like the Sun.
05:09But beneath its cloudy surface, a darkness looms.
05:15Scientists believe a thick black liquid swirls below where intense pressures and temperatures transform hydrogen into a strange new substance.
05:26The secret of Jupiter's giant magnetic field may lie within this abyss.
05:35Scientists in Edinburgh are conducting a remarkable experiment to find out.
05:40So we call Jupiter a gas giant, but beneath the clouds of Jupiter, the planet's not really made of gas.
05:46It's made of something much, much stranger.
05:49Stuart McWilliams is investigating the mystery of what lies below Jupiter's clouds.
05:56Scientists know that Jupiter is 90% hydrogen.
06:04Let's go. Things work fast when they work here.
06:07This equipment can recreate some of the incredibly high pressures found inside Jupiter.
06:14To find out what happens to a gas under the extreme conditions deep inside the planet.
06:20In the bottom of the ocean, the pressure from all the water that's on top of you is about a thousand times Earth's atmospheric pressure.
06:28And in the center of the Earth, it's about a million times.
06:32But in the center of Jupiter, it's almost a billion times the pressure in Earth's atmosphere.
06:37Stuart is going to expose a gas more commonly found on Earth to the pressures found deep within Jupiter.
06:44He uses oxygen because it's easier to control in the lab.
06:48It reacts to pressure in the same way as hydrogen.
06:51Oxygen is very similar to hydrogen, and so they have similar properties when you put them under pressure inside a planet.
06:59At low pressures, light can easily pass through the sample.
07:03If I put my hand behind the sample, the light goes away.
07:07So we're seeing light now coming through oxygen, and we're able to see right through it.
07:13And of course, oxygen, like hydrogen, when you squeeze on it, it starts to change.
07:18Stuart begins to squeeze the gas.
07:21Under extreme pressures, the structure of oxygen transforms.
07:2662, 63.
07:29There it goes. Oxygen has now just turned solid, and crystals are starting to form in the system.
07:36The oxygen becomes opaque.
07:39It's beginning to change its structure.
07:42We're starting to see the oxygen's beginning to turn a little bit darker, and a little more orange, and there it goes.
07:49We've turned now our oxygen sample into a totally black substance here.
07:56We were trying to shine light through it, and it's being totally absorbed inside the oxygen.
08:02This black substance is created simply by putting an ordinary gas under extreme pressure.
08:11Stuart believes his experiments prove that the pressure within Jupiter transforms hydrogen gas into a new, different state.
08:20But this isn't enough to explain Jupiter's enormous magnetic field.
08:25An even stranger force must be at work.
08:29Deeper inside the planet, the conditions intensify.
08:35Beneath the dark hydrogen, scientists think, there's an even more bizarre layer.
08:42An ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen.
08:45An exotic state of hydrogen that doesn't exist on Earth.
08:5012,000 miles deep, this metallic ocean transforms the planet into an enormous dynamo.
08:58As it spins, it creates a magnetic field that extends nearly 4 million miles around Jupiter.
09:07The biggest planetary structure in the solar system.
09:14Scientists now believe metallic hydrogen powers Jupiter's magnetic field.
09:20But in the lab, it's proving difficult to make.
09:23People everywhere are racing to create metallic hydrogen.
09:27And over the years, we think we've seen metallic hydrogen fleetingly in the laboratory.
09:32But we can't reproduce these claims.
09:36Jupiter seems able to create new forms of hydrogen, but it defies human attempts to recreate it in the lab.
09:43The only possible explanation for that magnetic field is the existence of metallic state of hydrogen deep within Jupiter.
09:50And so it's really, experiments are trying to catch up to nature.
09:54The pressure inside Jupiter is unrivaled by the other planets in our solar system.
10:01Only the sun creates a greater force.
10:04Jupiter is so big, so massive, that we know as you descend into the interior of Jupiter,
10:10you will reach pressures where an element like hydrogen doesn't just liquefy.
10:15It actually begins to behave like a metal.
10:19Now, the reason the metal is shiny is that metal atoms actually share electrons.
10:24And with the hydrogen compressed so close together, the same thing happens, and you get metallic hydrogen.
10:30This metallic hydrogen is something that is very difficult to make.
10:34But because Jupiter is so powerful, it's so cool, and it has such awesome gravity, it can create metallic hydrogen.
10:42Jupiter's magnetic field reaches out deep into space.
10:52When tiny charged particles come into contact with it, they produce radio waves that telescopes can detect on Earth.
11:01Scientists observing Jupiter in ultraviolet light can see an extraordinary phenomena caused by the magnetic field.
11:11Huge auroras, the brightest and biggest in the solar system.
11:16The auroras here on Earth, our northern and southern lights, are caused by the interaction of our magnetic field with particles from the sun.
11:24Well, Jupiter's magnetic field is so extreme, it actually generates auroras all by itself.
11:29These great glowing masses of particles hitting the upper atmosphere due to the magnetic field.
11:36But like everything on Jupiter, they're supersized.
11:39But the unparalleled brightness of Jupiter's auroras can't be explained by its magnetic field alone.
11:46Now scientists around the world are investigating how the auroras have become so powerful.
11:54I'm going to step back actually because I can feel the heat so intensely here.
11:59What awesome power is fueling Jupiter's auroras?
12:16Jupiter behaves more like a star than an ordinary planet like Earth.
12:23It's made from the same stuff as the sun.
12:28And supercharged auroras suggest that extremely powerful radiation surrounds Jupiter.
12:36This makes getting near to the planet very difficult.
12:42Trying to get anywhere close to Jupiter is really, really hard because of the intense radiation of the magnetic field.
12:49So when you send a spacecraft, you understand it's not going to live for very long.
12:53We've not been to Jupiter that many times, which is one reason NASA's Juno mission is so exciting.
13:01Juno has been sent right into the heart of Jupiter's auroras to discover the secrets behind the radiation that causes them.
13:12Launched in 2011 and costing more than a billion dollars,
13:17Juno travels at more than 124,000 miles per hour,
13:22covering over one and a half billion miles on its five-year journey to Jupiter.
13:30This is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
13:34It's the nerve center for the Juno mission.
13:37So we've just been through our first science pass with all the instruments on.
13:42Everybody's doing great.
13:44Everybody's healthy.
13:45The data's looking amazing.
13:46All the scientists are incredibly excited.
13:55Heidi Becker is studying the radiation environment around Jupiter using Juno.
14:00When Juno went through the really nasty radiation environment for the first time.
14:05It's kind of an edge of your seat type moment.
14:09Heidi measures the strength of radiation around Jupiter by looking at photographs of stars taken by the Juno spacecraft.
14:19This is a regular radiation-free image collected by Juno's star tracker.
14:25The stars appear like points of light, like you're used to when you look up at the stars at night.
14:33The stars are constant points of light in the photograph.
14:36But when radiation particles hit the camera, they appear suddenly as additional white spots and streaks of light.
14:44Each of these frames is another level of radiation.
14:47And all of these squiggles and holes that are being added to the star field, that's the radiation signature.
14:53These are the radiation particles that create Jupiter's auroras.
14:58The particles are kind of like machine gun fire creating bullet holes in an image.
15:04And so we can count those individual bullet holes.
15:07And that's what helps me understand the radiation environment.
15:10So one person's noise is another person's music or data.
15:15This data from Juno allows scientists to map the planet's radiation.
15:20The radiation fields of Jupiter are so intense, we know they are going to eventually fry our spacecraft.
15:28Juno has on the order of about a two-year lifetime.
15:31We understand that.
15:33This intense radiation lights up Jupiter's auroras.
15:37But where does it come from?
15:40What's feeding Jupiter's magnetic field with radiation?
15:44Scientists looking for evidence have spotted clues in a mysterious bright spot, tracing a path across the lights.
15:53They now think that Io, one of the 67 moons that orbit Jupiter, holds the key to the planet's auroras.
16:04There's this very intense magnetic interaction between Jupiter and its moons.
16:12And you can actually see this in the aurora, and you see a glowing spot moving around in the auroras.
16:16And one of the most dramatic ones, the most dramatic footprints to see is that of Io.
16:21Io orbits at 217,000 miles from Jupiter, held in place by the planet's massive gravity.
16:29It's nothing like the moon that orbits Earth.
16:33When we sent our first spacecraft, we saw, amazingly, volcanoes going off.
16:39Could these remote volcanoes be the source of Jupiter's supercharged auroras?
17:01Scientists at Syracuse University in New York are investigating if volcanoes on Io are the cause of Jupiter's magnificent aurora.
17:07By making their own volcano.
17:12I've poured lava over a thousand times, and probably seen more lava than a lot of volcanologists.
17:19Professor Bob Wysocki runs the lava project.
17:23He uses his homemade furnace to replicate the geological conditions on other worlds.
17:29Tonight, he's gearing up to investigate how volcanic activity on one of Jupiter's moons
17:34might fuel the planet's deadly radiation and light up its auroras.
17:40Bob heats basalt rock until it melts.
17:44We're going to charge the furnace now, and this is simply just putting more material in to melt overnight.
17:49The furnace burns at 2300 degrees Fahrenheit.
17:54It takes an immense amount of energy to melt even a small amount of rock.
18:02So where does Io get the energy to fuel its volcanoes?
18:07It's all down to Io's immense and malevolent neighbor, Jupiter.
18:12The planet traps Io in a gravitational tug of war with other orbiting moons.
18:22Inside Io, the relentless push and pull from Jupiter heats up the interior to melting point,
18:29creating smoldering currents beneath the surface.
18:32As the pressure builds, the lava finally erupts through the moon's crust.
18:42It shoots scorching fountains of lava up to half a mile high,
18:47and floods the frozen surface with molten rock.
18:55Okay, Jeff, you ready to go?
18:56Yeah.
18:57In Syracuse, Bob is ready to pour the lava.
19:00We are just that one step below what comes out of a volcano
19:05in making and replicating what happens in nature.
19:09Well, we're doing an experiment today to try to better understand
19:13what happens when ice meets lava.
19:16Geologist Jeff Carson is joining Bob to see what happens when volcanoes erupt on Io.
19:23Io is extremely cold.
19:25Its surface is made from sulfur dioxide that is frozen solid.
19:31Bob monitors the furnace while Jeff examines how lava interacts with the ice.
19:37The physics that govern the way the lava flows form, the way they cool, the shapes they take on,
19:45these are all the same on other planetary objects, but the same basic physics applies.
19:49Scientists believe that the hot lava pouring out of Io's volcanoes onto its icy surface has a direct effect on Jupiter's radiation.
20:01Moving on to the ice, a bunch of bubbles are starting to form.
20:08You see a completely different style of behavior of the lava here.
20:12I'm going to step back, actually, because I can feel the heat so intensely here.
20:15But those bubbles are forming because water vapor is being produced, boiling the water in the ice.
20:23The vapor is escaping through the lava and blowing these beautiful bubbles.
20:27It's a really good analog for what could be happening on other planetary objects, like on Io.
20:34The hot lava causes the frozen ice to instantly vaporize into clouds of steam.
20:41On a place like Io, it would be sulfur that's being vaporized and sulfur dioxide making bubbles and being released into the atmosphere.
20:52Scientists now think that vaporized sulfur dioxide is the key ingredient to explain Jupiter's extraordinary auroras.
21:00Io's volcanoes vaporized the toxic sulfur dioxide that blasted into a nearly 50-mile umbrella plume.
21:11One ton every second flies into orbit around Jupiter.
21:17The sulfur dioxide supercharges the deadly radiation belt around the planet with a lethal particle storm.
21:23Jupiter's magnetic field then captures the sulfur dioxide particles and accelerates them to the poles of the planet at almost the speed of light.
21:34They strike Jupiter's atmosphere and create the spectacular aurora patterns, over 100 times more energetic than the northern lights on Earth.
21:45These volcanoes, instead of just throwing material a few tens of thousands of feet into the air, will throw material hundreds of miles out into space.
21:56These eruptions help generate a lethal radiation engulfing the whole planet.
22:01This makes Jupiter the most hostile place in the solar system besides the sun.
22:12But it's not just radiation that makes Jupiter so extreme.
22:16Deadly storms rage on the surface.
22:19Today, scientists are seeing unimaginable weather systems.
22:24Enormously more powerful than even the most terrifying hurricanes on Earth.
22:32The weather on Jupiter is pretty darn extreme.
22:35There are these belts that have winds that are zooming around very quickly and then in one direction in one and then the other direction in the other.
22:43Among all the swirling bands, there's an enigma.
22:47One feature that doesn't seem to change.
22:50Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot.
22:52The Great Red Spot is the longest running storm that humans have ever witnessed.
22:59So any image of Jupiter that you see, you see the cloud bands, but then you see this big red spot.
23:05Its area is about twice Earth's area.
23:09So you could fit two Earths inside it.
23:12Jupiter's weather is unlike anything witnessed on Earth.
23:17What makes its storms so colossal and violent?
23:20Jupiter, more than 1,000 times larger than the Earth.
23:27It's the biggest and baddest planet in the solar system.
23:29It's so deadly, it seems to have more in common with the Sun than a planet like Earth.
23:37Jupiter has single storms larger than its neighboring planets.
23:39They rage for centuries and create its unmistakable appearance.
23:40If you were to go to Jupiter, you'd be in for some very serious weather.
23:49But hey, maybe the kite surfing would be good, or the parachuting, because you're gonna have to deal with some serious winds and some serious storms.
23:59The Great Red Spot is this gigantic swirling storm that has lasted for hundreds of years.
24:03You know, storms on Earth don't last that long.
24:06Jupiter's Great Red Spot is one of the biggest and oldest storms in the solar system.
24:10The Great Red Spot is one of the biggest and oldest storms in the solar system.
24:13The mystery is, what keeps it spinning?
24:14Scientists at UCLA's Spin Lab in California are trying to understand Jupiter's extreme weather.
24:16Jupiter's Great Red Spot is this gigantic swirling storm that has lasted for hundreds of years.
24:19You know, storms on Earth don't last that long.
24:22Jupiter's Great Red Spot is one of the biggest and oldest storms in the solar system.
24:28It would be impossible for us to get to Jupiter and survive, so we have the next best thing.
24:46Here at Spin Lab, we do simulations of Jupiter in the lab.
24:50Juan Laura has a surprising tool to understand Jupiter's atmosphere, a tank of water.
24:57With this setup here, we are simulating a planetary atmosphere in the lab.
25:02I know it doesn't look much like a planet, but imagine just looking down at the center of the table,
25:06and that represents the polar region of the planet.
25:09The table will spin, so as you head out to the edges of the table,
25:13that represents lower latitudes on the planet.
25:17Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in the solar system.
25:21The day on Jupiter lasts only ten hours.
25:28The fluid in the table is now spinning like a planetary atmosphere would be.
25:32So now we are going to add some dye, and let's see what happens.
25:34The colored fluids represent different cloud systems.
25:38This experiment should reveal clues about how they interact.
25:41Adding any sort of turbulence to a rotating fluid will create some interesting dynamics.
25:46Juan stirs the water to create turbulence.
25:51Turbulence occurs in Jupiter's atmosphere when gases of different temperatures and speeds come together.
25:58Once you get turbulence and you disturb a fluid that is rotating quickly, like this tank in Jupiter,
26:03then you get these vortices, and the vortices are very stable,
26:07and they like to interact with each other sometimes.
26:11This is like the red spot.
26:13As soon as it was formed, it is able to be maintained by the rotation of Jupiter.
26:19Jupiter's rotation energizes the great red spot and keeps it spinning.
26:25But how did it get so large in the first place?
26:31The great red spot is larger than all planets.
26:34Winds whip around at over 400 miles per hour to form a cyclone that rises nearly five miles above the clouds.
26:46The striking red color is believed to be the gas reacting with the sun's rays.
26:53Behind the sunburnt surface, these twisting clouds remain gray inside.
26:58As smaller storms approach, they are ruthlessly cannibalized by the giant.
27:05Their energy and spin add to the great red spot's size and power.
27:09Is this super storm destined to rage forever?
27:14Today, scientists can see something strange is happening.
27:19Jupiter's great red spot has been changing over the past 20 years.
27:21So here, an image taken in 1995, where you can see that the great red spot is quite large and oval-shaped.
27:28If you compare this image to one taken in 2009, the spot has become more circular and it's also smaller in size.
27:35And then from 2014, shows again a further shrinkage of the spot.
27:38The great red spot feeds on other storms to survive.
27:45It consumes them, absorbing their energy to keep spinning.
27:50And if it's not fed, it'll starve.
27:54It's possible that in the past 20 years, fewer of those vortices have come into contact with the great red spot.
28:00Scientists also think that some smaller storms could actually damage the great red spot.
28:06Another possibility is that it's eating, if you will, vortices that are spinning more slowly than it is spinning.
28:14And therefore, there's a net loss of spin.
28:17Storms that move slower or spin in the opposite direction could be putting the brakes on the great red spot.
28:25Its extraordinary longevity could simply be an exceptional streak of luck that's only now running out.
28:34The fact that it's changing and so quickly and so dramatically after being stable for so long does suggest that maybe something is taking place.
28:45Maybe it will shrink till the point we can't see it.
28:47We don't know. We have to keep watching.
28:50Only time will tell if Jupiter's most famous feature will survive another hundred years.
28:56The extreme physics on Jupiter creates unparalleled weather systems visible from space.
29:04And scientists are just beginning to understand the conditions inside the planet's clouds.
29:11What they are finding is extraordinary.
29:13One of the big surprises when we got to Jupiter with spacecraft was to see that there was lightning on the dark side.
29:21These images taken by NASA spacecraft are evidence of lightning strikes in Jupiter's atmosphere.
29:27They could trigger an astonishing chemical reaction deep inside Jupiter's colorful clouds.
29:35A thick fog of gas surrounds Jupiter.
29:40Friction in the clouds generates super bolts of lightning.
29:43These strikes are many times more powerful than lightning on Earth.
29:5262 miles beneath the surface.
29:57The clouds harbor methane as well as hydrogen.
30:01When the superheated electric shock rips through the atmosphere,
30:04the conditions are perfect for an extraordinary chemical reaction,
30:09unlike anything else in the solar system.
30:25Jupiter's lightning bolts are stronger than anything we've witnessed on Earth.
30:29And the resulting chemical reaction unleashes a shower of unimaginable riches.
30:35The lightning transforms the elements into diamonds.
30:39Jupiter keeps its bling on the inside because it may be raining diamonds.
30:44Now, think about this.
30:46Jupiter has incredibly strong winds and diamonds are really hard.
30:50So talk about a hailstorm.
30:53Scientists at Cardiff University are trying to understand
30:57how diamonds might be created out of thin air on Jupiter.
31:03Professor Oliver Williams simulates Jupiter's lightning-charged atmosphere in the lab.
31:10I'm using an airtight chamber that I've sucked all the air out to make a vacuum.
31:16I'm going to flow in hydrogen and methane gas.
31:19I'm flowing in 99% hydrogen and 1% methane.
31:23And this is like the atmosphere of Jupiter.
31:24But the experiment really begins when Oliver adds the final ingredient, lightning.
31:31And I'm going to break this gas down using high-power microwaves.
31:35This is very like lightning, where a high electric field is breaking down the air
31:39and making these lightning bolts.
31:41Microwaves, like lightning on Jupiter, break down hydrogen and methane gas.
31:47It glows purple as the atoms break apart.
31:53So diamond is fundamentally made out of carbon.
31:57Methane is actually carbon with four hydrogen atoms.
32:00We're able to strip these hydrogen away.
32:03The microwaves release carbon atoms from methane gas.
32:07The atoms join together to form a diamond.
32:09Inside this chamber, a slice of diamond literally grows out of thin air.
32:16So what we've done is we've broken down these gases that you do see in places like Jupiter.
32:21And from this chemistry, we've grown a crystalline form of carbon, which is diamond.
32:24Experiments like this suggest diamonds form like hail in Jupiter's lightning storms.
32:32But something even more extraordinary happens as they fall.
32:37As the diamonds are zapped into existence, they begin to descend through the atmosphere as diamond hailstones.
32:45They plummet thousands of miles through Jupiter's atmosphere towards the core.
32:52Racing into higher and higher pressures and temperatures.
32:57When they hit 14,400 degrees, they melt, creating a shower of liquid diamond raindrops.
33:06But what comes next is an even more bizarre theoretical possibility.
33:10Diamond rain could lead to a sparkling diamond ocean far below.
33:17Jupiter's world may be stranger than science fiction.
33:23By borrowing Jupiter's technique, it's possible to make any size of diamond.
33:31I've been able to grow a very thin layer of diamond.
33:34And this is over quite a large area. This is two inches.
33:36It's only a few hundred nanometers thick.
33:40But if we grow for longer, we're able to grow much more diamond and much thicker.
33:44Diamonds we find on Earth are millions of years old.
33:48But by mimicking Jupiter's atmosphere, they can appear out of thin air.
33:53The extreme physics on Jupiter creates weather totally unlike anything on Earth.
34:00The tremendous forces forge a unique world in our solar system.
34:07In fact, Jupiter behaves more like a star than a mere planet.
34:14Could Jupiter actually be the Sun's secret twin?
34:30Jupiter is a planet of extremes.
34:38Moons larger than the planet Mercury.
34:41Radiation stronger than anywhere else but the Sun.
34:46It dwarfs every other planet in the solar system.
34:49So is Jupiter meant to be a star?
34:52Just as the Sun is made primarily of hydrogen, so is Jupiter.
34:58And so it looks like a star, only it's one that's not burning.
35:02Jupiter is really massive and it's held on to its hydrogen.
35:06So that's kind of unusual in the solar system is to have a planet made of hydrogen.
35:11Scientists are beginning to understand how Jupiter formed by investigating what happened in the early solar system.
35:17They're hunting for clues by observing the birth of other distant stars.
35:30Deep in the deserts of California sits the Owens Valley Radio Observatory.
35:36These dishes make up the Karma Radio Telescope Array.
35:41This location is absolutely gorgeous.
35:44Astronomer John Tobin scans the skies for newborn stars.
35:51Rather than building one really big radio telescope, which is very difficult to do,
35:57they built a lot of small dishes and then they link them together and further apart you move them,
36:02the higher resolution you get, which means it acts like a bigger telescope and you get, you can see finer detail.
36:07John is looking for protostars.
36:11Brand new stars that are only just condensing from a vast cloud of gas and debris.
36:17A protostar is a newborn star, so it's still in the process of forming and building up its mass.
36:25And in interstellar space there are clouds of gas and dust and at the center a protostar will be born.
36:32Jupiter was formed from the same clouds of hydrogen gas and dust that form stars.
36:39Could it have formed like a protostar?
36:42John is finding evidence thousands of light years away that explains how star systems form.
36:48This image is showing you that the black is in the contours, they're the intensity of the radiation that we're detecting from this protostar.
36:58There's not just one protostar, but there's two protostars, so these two peaks that you see here and here, those are the two forming protostars.
37:07It's a solar system very different from our own.
37:10My first reaction to this was, wow. I couldn't believe the detail that we were seeing towards this object.
37:20Because previously we knew there was one thing there, but then we found out that there looks like there's at least two objects around in this protostar.
37:28And so that was unexpected. We didn't know that we were going to find that, so that was a surprise to us.
37:33Could Jupiter have once stood toe-to-toe with the Sun?
37:37From the outside, each young star system looks alike, starting life as a spiraling disk of dust and gas.
37:47But what evolves inside can be very different.
37:51Deep in the middle of the disk, turbulence can cause the central cloud to split into two and collapse into not one, but two shining stars in the center.
38:06The stars orbit each other in a hypnotic dance. Born from the same cloud, this solar system has twin stars.
38:16Any dust and gas left over will go on to form planets.
38:20In our solar system, the Sun is the only shining star.
38:28But another massive ball of hydrogen quietly orbits from afar.
38:34Jupiter.
38:36Could this planet be the Sun's double that didn't ignite?
38:41Scientists believe that solar systems with twin suns are very common.
38:45Well, since that first result using these telescopes here, we've been carrying out a much larger survey of protostars in order to see just how many star systems form with two or three or more stars.
38:59And we're finding that a surprising large number of star systems form with more than one star.
39:03John wants to try to discover the precise conditions that create these binary solar systems where two stars orbit each other.
39:14We've been putting together a compendium of images of young star systems in order to find out which ones are binary or multiple.
39:24So this one is a single star system. This one here is a double.
39:28As many as half of all stars in the universe have a partner star, both formed from a single disk of gas and dust that breaks apart.
39:39The system we are looking at is located right here, where the clouds of gas are kind of stretched out and extended.
39:44There might be multiple centers of collapse that can lead to the formation of more than one star.
39:48A cloud of gas and dust that is stretched out will likely collapse into multiple stars very close to each other.
39:57John thinks our solar system must have formed in a different way.
40:02So we think our own solar system may have looked something more like this one, where you have just one star surrounded by its disk.
40:10And then the disk itself is lower mass and is not going to fragment into more than one star.
40:15Scientists believe the type of hydrogen cloud that gave rise to our solar system cut short Jupiter's quest to become a star.
40:24In its race to grow up, the Sun got a head start sucking up 99% of all the matter in the young solar system.
40:32When it reached 27 million degrees, it ignited.
40:39Meanwhile, the same cloud was condensing into Jupiter, rapidly snowballing to collect two-thirds of all the matter left over.
40:49But there was not enough matter left for Jupiter to get big enough to ignite.
40:54So it became a gas giant, more than double the mass of all other planets in the solar system combined.
41:04No normal planet, Jupiter, is the star's younger sibling.
41:10It would make sense to think, well, where's the Sun's binary partner?
41:14And immediately the mind goes to Jupiter.
41:16If Jupiter had gathered enough mass to ignite into a star, it's unlikely that the Earth would have ever been formed.
41:25The solar system would be a very different place with twin suns.
41:31Instead, Jupiter became the most extraordinary world in the solar system.
41:36Everything about Jupiter is extreme. Its mass is more than 300 times that of Earth.
41:43You could fit a thousand Earths inside this one planet.
41:46It has a magnetic field so intense it would kill you with the radiation.
41:50Its winds blow at over 400 miles an hour.
41:53I mean, can you imagine a more extreme place?
41:57To me, Jupiter is perhaps the most fascinating object in our solar system.
42:01It's certainly the most alien.
42:04It is an enormous, strange ball of swirling gas surrounded by its own miniature planetary system.
42:14Formed at the very beginning of the solar system, from the same material as the Sun,
42:20Jupiter is a mysterious, bizarre, and unique world that we're only just beginning to understand.
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