This episode of astronomy cast is brought to you bye swing burn astronomy online the world longest running online astronomy degree program this it astronomy dot s w i n died at u dot eighty or for more information. From here two hundred and twenty six one way or am i mean thousand left what strongly accounts alrighty backspace journey too because most reopen understand normally what we know what how we know what will. My name is fraser came on the publisher university and with me is doctor pamela care professors. Southern illinois university ever family just. I'm doing well how are you doing crazy doing great no i know you wanted to pop up the store today yes it's actually tee shirts. Season even in like the places where he's just ever stop snowing it's starting to be t. shirt and giant mosquitoes season. And well astronomy cast tee shirts will not protect you against mosquitos you will at least look really good and nerd you while you're getting eaten by the bugs seven i watch other people stop and say cool shirt. What's the strong to be cast and then i then i didn't have a new listener so. No definitely if you where the shirt you have the responsibility of promoting to show just just request but you look cool you look super cool and people of the short. Yeah. So how how could a person purchase. These wonderful items well that's a wonderful question phrase. So all you have to do is go to astra gear a s t r o g e a r astra gear dot com we'll get you there and we have not just t. shirts but we also have pins and c d's and posters and. All the proceeds go to paint the happy people that make the show go that aren't fraser and i who do this because we love you all. Yeah yeah we don't get but but we have uh joe ria who at helps keep everything up to date on and the website to nancy i can send and. Uh one the named romeo who does the transcript pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed and is awesome and he's the reason you hear rest right now. Correct and we want to pay them so if i t. shirts and look awesome and leave there you go oh alright what's get older children how's the weather well maybe better question is why the weather. What is it about planets and they're atmospheres it create weather systems what have planetary so i just learned about a earth whether and how does really to the other planets in the solar system and what is the most extreme weather that we know up in the whole universe. Or at home so what's the weather. Because they're a thermal grady and so so what. If we were gonna like what you know webster's dictionary showed what is what is the weather so the weather is v changed in various atmospheric properties humidity dense. Pressure all of these different things as a function of altitude as a function of time as a function of where you are located on it and see planet and as you said it's thermal grady ends. That because thermal greedy into exist because there are differences in temperature it different places in the atmosphere. We get whether exactly it all comes down to the ideal gas light a certain level because has it as you have. Variations in temperature it causes the gas to contract expand depending on what that change in temperature is. And um if you have a gas contracting well more gas is going to flow and it's a giant system everything's connected if you have the gas expanding it's going to push on things. And all of this hasn't affected drives winded tries flows you can have changes that because no because rain because nato's if you're unfortunate. And it it's all about that difference in temperature from one place to another and so you're getting these differences in temperature from. One sort of one physical location to another one you're getting these temperature differences depending on altitude soon you know you could be a one place and it's. Warmer and then higher up it's colder so what is the cause of each other tr- variations he says knowing. Well it the most fundamental level the sun is only on one side of the planted a given moment. And so that is the fundamental driver of all these various right and this is what all the different planets have some sort of. It if if you took a planet and you were able to quite happily put it inside of a start fear where every single point receive the exact same amount of illumination the exact same but why would you do that. What kind you could get rid of perhaps i hope you good well could. Alright any the blame able to read well sufficiently large enough fear or it's fine doing the problem sure go ahead put money that was feel feel over so but okay. So if you were able to create this artificial fear of star add make it sufficiently large cities to not forget see a planet and you're able to take that planet under constant illumination and just sit it there. And how it's constant surface features so every place on the planet absorbed in omitted light in the exact same way then you could have a whether list planet. But. As long as there's any variation anywhere even in that fear of stop if your planet was white on one side in black on the other that would be enough to drive some sort of weather in the atmosphere fourth or mountains or you name it okay yeah. Alright and although we we kind of have. Some planets though in the solar system we have one planet that doesn't experience very much weather all the right with being a c. Well did it does have pretty much constant missouri but that constant missouri that it experiences you see in the clouds. Patterns in of the wins you see these banding jet streams you see divorced tex at the polls. All of this is driven by there are thermal grady and send this overall misery that is the plan is he in. Right to back to earth then so we're gonna temperature grady ends we've got differences in location depending on where the sun is shining. We've got differences in altitude about hi how high up you know the c level you are and also just differences in in latitudes right if you're in raleigh north. You experience less sunlight and if you're in the south or if you're near the equator you experienced more somebody them and it gives you get down to the southern pole less sunlight. So what does this turn into for a planet so we have. The major thing that dominates our weather is the difference between tropical he thinks that this is where between roughly florida and the southern equivalent of where florida is located which is part way down africa. Tropical band and within the tropical bands lots of sunlight lots of heating oceans get much warmer because of all of the heating and this. One temperature extreme then at both of the polls you have very very little sunlight some parts of the year pretty much know some light at all and that's a very very cold region of the planet. And this a difference between the two regions sets up what's called the jet stream which is the predominant whoa. Blowing wind at higher altitudes and in fact hurricanes are what happens when the jet stream behaved badly. And so you can kind of explain all of the weather systems the views of jet stream of some of the of the big ones but then we see view so. Mole localized weather systems. You know we're having a particularly cold spring here right what striving out. So so i i have to admit i don't know exactly what is driving vancouver right now hold or you'll have to general greater conditions where it says local weather conditions where you end up with is things like. Long lasting snow cover that smell beat a difference or not that you. Insulating factor so rather than letting nice dark land heat out then track in the heat which is part of why the hottest days this summer lag behind to the longest day of summer. So with without getting all of your snow melting which i know is a problem you're having the snow that still there is able to. Not let the land warm up and not with the land help warm up the air you also can end up with local oceans trapping and warm cold. And again this is is this is in this case it's not a heat reserve but it's a heat sync so energy that might not otherwise be needed help he'd up the waters still needed to heat up the water. You can end up with all sorts of local affects it also depends on how much foliage is around so maybe the farmers planted something different or. Maybe the roofing materials have changed all of these different things can have affects the not necessarily anticipated when. When people are necessarily choosing what crops the plant and inadvertently change in the local regional temperatures and so then how well do sign just understand the the weather produce i mean you know there we see that that. Predicting the weather's in in exact science green bay that's kind of giving it a dozen generously. Yes that's true uh we're starting to get to the point that five days out at least you see the set up satellite so we have a for the north america as we're able to stay fairly well okay review easy. Bad actually to storm coming prepared to hide you. They were able to actually give with the the nicest bands of tornadoes there recently went through the american south they were able to give several days warning there's something really really bad was coming. So were able to look at the planet were able to look at the high pressures owns a little pressures zones were able to know the oceans containing this much he's were able to know the land is containing this much heat. And run complex computer simulations the takes in to affect all of the. Top tigers fan all of c atmospheric conditions and say five days out roughly what's coming but beyond that it starts to get too difficult and things break down very quickly. Do you do you think that there i mean we gonna be getting better this and what's needed. Well eh the problem with with whether it is it's a chaotic system which means that slight differences. Of maybe a degree of maybe a couple of new skyscrapers of. Just. A boat blowing it porn this slight differences the better flying the what in in the wednesday you've always heard about on t. v. those things because huge affects it blow up over the time scale of about a week. So it it's the rate at which the errors in our measurements dot and it's not the fact that were making errors now measurement it's the fact that there's chaos in our measurement that we can't. We can't say if the drop in jurassic park is going to go to the left or to the right so without being able to start controlling our weather better we can't predict our weather better. It's kind of surprising when you think about the fact that the earth them the most of the earth around the sun or known within centimeters the you know the the. I just the angle of the sons you know radiation right hitting on excuse known the amount of radiation coming over the phone is no so policy of yours is known. The amounts of cover and ice and all that and you know was all fairly known it's it's interesting. The the kills comes in there somewhere you know and and part of the problem is trying to take into account of all the little moving heat sources. And to think about something as simple as trying to keep hey auditorium and a convention center center a constant temperature. If you arrive for some sort of a large binary see speech say you're going to go here steve jobs announced the latest greatest whatever it is from apple that i know i will probably purchase because i'm just that type of person i. If if you show up early the auditorium that you might hold a couple thousand people is gonna be frigid cold. But by the time everyone gets into the room and everyone flips up in their technology or their technologies and. All those little things heat sources that room is going to end up overheating and people are gonna end up taking off their jackets and listening their ties trying to deal with the fact that that one's frigid around which is now filled with all of these little tiny human eat sources. Is now a much. Warmer around and. So okay he want to compensate had you need to figure it out how do you pace the system it starts to become very complicated because you have to figure out something as stupid as how many pieces of technology that produce how much heat are people going to bring with them. Because compensate in from that book pro which is a really good space heater in winter versus compensate in for an eye pad which one keep anything warm. Those are two different problems now that's justin auditorium. Now if you're instead trying to figure out how to compensate for understanding the intra because he's if the weather over city you have to be able to deal with such things as well how many ourselves are going to be produced by. All this the cars by all of the airplanes we saw it during the days after nine eleven i. Massive changes in cloud cover it just because they're if you're airplanes to the simple active saying ok there's thunderstorms ever louisiana let's send all of the airplanes nor. That's going to change the weather but there were variations whether before they're humans you know saying you know thought our fault. Well no it's definitely not our fault but you still have to be able to take into account all sorts of random things there's always been forest fires and there's always been just heard the buffalo. Oh see over that has been completely eaten down by sheet versus the field of knee highs prairie grass. Those are going to it intact the weather right clicked and blooms volcanoes. Looking it seriously it and impact everyday um big snow falls them at all just be goes on and on floating so. Yeah so then then what what lessons i guess have the science learned about but whether the we see on earth wh- and then compare what are what kinds of whether do we see on the other planets obviously we need that was fear so mergers out. And fetuses surprisingly electrician it just says variable weather it has very little differentiate shin and it's whether it has win very little temperature greeting yeah it has horrible software gossip raymond. Right you know other nephew stuff so the types of things that we've been able to to look at and understand are when we look at planetary atmospheres you're you're dealing with differences and he'd hang on the two different. Front and back son facing not fun facing size of the planet. And you're dealing with the fact that the surface of the planet is a rotating underneath the atmosphere. And so you have. Energy going into the system and this chaos of differential rotation because the equator is going to be rotating much faster than the pole. And what the sense of dealing it's setting up cells and the atmosphere. So when the you look at planets like well jupiter this banding of the cells is extremely obvious where what you see these beautiful stripes around the planet but what each of these straight p that's actually are. It's just areas where you have circulation in the atmosphere where on one side that band hot atmosphere is rising and on the other north to south side of the band. The cold air thinking called atmospheres thinking and so you have the band's north to south. Going through different circulation well also rate hating around and around and around the planet in east to west sort of direction or the going look in opposite directions. And that's one of the cool things is. Different bands do alternate in which direction you're going and we have the same thing on the planet earth to a certain degree we have far fewer band so we don't really notice that. But what we have is that happily so down towards the i could toilet region the sterile so up above that. And with the need latitude happily so you have this general i'm going to track slightly south and west behavior. Whereas with uh more nor there lee styles tell you have air i'm going to track east and north. Direction writing in a situation like jupiter where it's like a it's a perfect environment there's there's are much higher temperature greetings between the center of the planet and the. You know and space oh yeah you've got known land masses to stop anything from happening and you've got. Massive gravity and you you know so what's you can see the that sort of in the perfect situation you can even seat on the sign right yeah exactly the of conduct themselves on the sign and and it's kind of amazing about the earth's atmosphere is. The atmosphere itself really extends more than six hundred climate or something. But whether itself for the most part is confined to to just the first fifteen kilometers. And so. Just is very small small height of our atmosphere. Contains all the interesting stuff that's going on and in fact in winter the interesting bits end up getting stuck even closer to the earth because the cold there of course contracts and you end up with. The atmosphere shrunk even closer to the surface of the plan somewhere else we c- weather in this whole system. I think the most interesting whether that we see in some regards is the planet tightened which has like venus cloud cover about that but we know from some of the images from lincolns pro that there's definitely. All sorts of saloon veal fluid based geography been neat so we think that these nothing clouds are raining out now sane rained it's leading to nineteen reverts on this. World where nothing is that it's triple point it allows it to be liquid solid and gas for. And and same situation you've got the sohn heating tightened from one side in the tiniest rotating or just were bidding saturn and so. You know sometimes it's short one face other times destroying another face but it's also blinking and then out of the good old clips every once in awhile yeah yeah exactly and so you can see an old through you know you good schools run further away from the sun depending on whether. Where saturns on it and sort that so right. You can see that some of these changes are are pretty dramatic oh how how extreme is the weather on time this is one of the things were still trying to learn and it's unfortunate that we're essentially looking strictly at the top of. Well opaque clout so. There's been various return signals when we've tried to send different wavelengths of light through the atmosphere ugh tightened that have let us to believe that there's rain going on but. We only have a few years worth of data and it's not a lot of data and wouldn't it be glorious if we could put a weather satellite nor but that would be constantly returning i r images constantly returning radar returns and. Allows to really get a sense of what was going on for spacecraft or but tight and the other be alright. I'm i'm good with that one too so what about more sorry i know more scripts really interesting weather yeah mario it's it it's not the type of weather that we used to thinking about we don't think of dust is whether but the reality is that. With with myers e if the planet will undergo these massive almost entirely planet wide dust storms. Uh we're still trying understand what triggers them we know that they're seasonal we also see the ice caps. They grow and received from season to season just like we see our own ice grow and received it especially now with the north pole here on the planet earth. We see that exact same growing shrinking but what's interesting is the growing and shrinking there. Actually affects the thickness of the atmosphere because. The ice go straight from being large white supplied sh- beautiful from ground based telescope even uh nice fourteen inch will let you see the polls of mars. To instead being almost invisible polar caps and a much sticker atmosphere. But you can just imagine i mean it's gotta be some really interesting pro stuff but cranks up the wind. Yeah ross the whole planet it kicks had dust up into the air. And even when it's not massive dust storm season. We've caught on inches from the mars exploration rowe versus dirt devil dots like you see racing across the american southwest whatever clearing all the rumors exactly yeah exactly. And and what's amazing is some of the high rise images you look down at sea these crazy pads of exposed lower level dirt on mars and she's like what the heck caused that. And then you realize that what you're actually seeing if the path of destruction of a dirt devil. Yeah that's great so it's the same process or you look at birth you look at mars you look at tightened you'll get to put her. All the same pros what's going on what about places like polluter woman i know the poodle as a bit of an atmosphere. During it's summer right. Right so it what what happens with put oh it's it's not so much that the polar caps supplement and make an atmosphere but a certain amount of the entire plant well we don't know if it's the entire planet we don't know if put his. We we don't know that much yet i wish there was a mission going there right now at nothing sure night anyway and i i don't know in my because what like new horizon yeah compiling twenty fifteen alright. So so we we don't entirely know what's happening but what we do now. Is. Part of put a surface. Sobel mates and it comes up very thin atmosphere that causes stars they're getting a call to die plea to to. Flicker as as they get ready and you see change in the brightens and the change in the light if the stars and what's neat is well the date for this episode is is quite a while in the past because we we're trying to catch up on back episodes right now. In june of two thousand one eleven there's going to be a occupation visible for different parts of the planet of window and to put it's gonna pass in front of the star. And right now it's it's an training it's it's summer months and so war summary yours is the case may be. And so hopefully we'll be able to see some of that flickering of of star light as is behind the atmosphere split up well enough what are boring solar system. There are some cool breeze you whether out in the universe oh yeah i mean your toes yes we're sort planets have been discovered so if you know let's let's hit some of the highlights because of some really neat planets open. Well i i think the highlights are all of the planet that are sufficiently close. To their parents star that they're title e locked uhhuh so you have this whole family of planets that. One side of the planet and only one side of the planet always faces the sign just like our own moon only shows it's the old man in the moon never let's just see the. Pox marked other side of the man. Now if you only have one side of your planet after facing this time that one side is gonna get pretty pretty hot. And it said something massive invective zones where instead of being bands that run parallel to the equator east instead get connected zones that have sells it or. Passing the the error from to eat son facing to the number one son facing side of the planet. And we have models that are trying to understand what's going on but this is something we've never seen before outside of our computers simulations. Yeah it was actually surprising i i know what it when these planets were discovered it was surprising how well they actually did. Uhhuh the heat from them from the face. That you know the the the one season the star to the other side actually found the global temperature differences word just extreme. As they thought so you can just imagine you know there must be some for groceries wins like like what faster than a thousand columbus announced incredible wind's blowing. From one side of the plan to others ought to circulate this humor. Just amazing. And and one of the things about at least i think one maybe more of these planets you always have to say maybe more because they're finding new planets every time you blank. But at least one of these suckers is. Within the region of it's solar system where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet. So you have this planet orbiting a red dwarf star so close that it's title a lot but were able to behave like a happy normal rotating planet it might have had oceans but now it's instead has been saying whether and set. Yeah and and this is gonna be one of those things that we're going to you know the more of these planets so we find the more of these crazy extremes i just wish that we could see them closer better right we just can't. Yeah it's it's one of those frustrating things but was kinda cool though is at least if they are polite enough to transit in front of their star we can get it um measure on what's in there atmosphere so that's that's at least something that's pretty amazing. We think about a. Alright well that's great camel thank you very much no we know what's the weather and uh i'm gonna go out and into it. That sounds great or if you're having a slightly warmer days dallas and it's a total horrible spring literally ok provide but it's really care we quicker booster me through because printer for every episode are available on our website check it out it's running here so any comments courses your feedback to a folder in here area for you ma'am for sure nonprofit educational resource right away printer and our family day we're supported through the conservationists overwhelmingly you enjoy some here i want to see if it only it'll favorite band with trade just quit the building wink on the website although they haven't heard about them over u s characters you can support sure for free to rader review recommend it to your friends every little bit helps fourteen year old or what instructions that it was true airport go for it i'm sorry talk to them aforethought yeah got a tomorrow worth it or you would just throw it away trevor carol sure was that it is programs astronomy test is pretty well going oh universally over at all generous support in universe today so with wow oh uhhuh hm nah hm oh all right
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