How Saturn Works

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0:55Hey, and welcome to this podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Did I flub that line? Yes. Am I going to retake it? No, I am not. Welcome to the pod broadcast. This is stuff you should know, by the way. The far out edition. That's right. That's in stuff out there in space. Yeah, and not just stuff in general. We're actually going to zero in on one specific piece of stuff that's out there in space. A little planet called Saturn. That's right. The ringed beauty, as they like to say in the biz. It is, yeah. That's what the astrophysicists all call it. Uh-huh. Yeah. Or Saturn does have rings.

1:39It's not the only planet with rings, as we'll see. Or we can see now, I think, Jupiter and Uranus and is it Mercury also that has rings? But they're just, they don't hold a candle to Saturn's rings. Hey, get that candle away from my anus. Saturn's also a really ancient planet in that as far as human experience goes for as long as we've been looking up in the night sky we've seen Saturn because it is the sixth planet from the sun it's also the furthest planet away that you can see with the naked eye here on planet earth you want to know something funny before we go any further yeah always before we recorded Emily was asking, as she sometimes does, what we're recording.

2:27And I told her the two episodes, and she asked about Saturn, and I was like, not very interesting to me. She said, so what are you going to, what do you do in those episodes? Just like, do commentary and make jokes? I went, well, there's probably not going to be a lot of jokes. And she said, well, as long as you can make one about Uranus. And I said, I don't think I'll be able to, because it's about Saturn. And lo and behold, a minute and 20 in. Yeah. Wow. Now you have two more times to bring it back and then you'll have completed the comedy. I think that's a one or as they say, but I'm just excited to report back to Emily that that happened unexpectedly and delight.

3:05Delightedly. Well, way to go, Chuck. I thought you said it was going to be funny, though. Huh? Hey, you laughed. Was that pity? Let's just move on. All right. Great. So. Oh, yeah. Like I said, people have known about Saturn for a very, very long time. And in fact, I think 2 ,500 years ago, the first people to document it were the Sumerians. And not too long after that or around that time in India, the world's oldest astronomy book, the Surya Siddhanta, obviously. Whoever wrote it was like, I'm going to try to guess the diameter of Saturn. And I don't think they guessed at it like, you know, how many jelly beans are in this jar.

3:50kind of guess. Like they used math and geometry and all sorts of great stuff. Sure. But this is long before they should have. So what makes it impressive is that they were only off by a thousand miles. So today we believe that the diameter of Saturn is about 74 ,580 miles. In the Surya Siddhanta, they guessed 73 ,000 or estimated 73 ,580. That, my friend, is remarkable. Yeah, regular Lewis and or Clark. Kind of. Weren't they famous for like almost guessing the distance? Oh, yes. Yeah, great, great analogy. Sorry, it was lost on me at first. So the name itself, Saturn, is named after Saturnus, which is the god of agriculture and harvest.

4:42So it came from the Romans. And, you know, Saturn goes pretty slowly across the sky. So the day Saturday is named for Saturn, which is the last day of the week. And now we're going to compare Saturn to Earth in a lot of scintillating ways. And we could start with just the massive size because it makes Earth look like just a pea in a pocket, basically. It makes it look like a nickel if Saturn was a volleyball. NASA loves that one. If you ever look up Saturn's size, NASA uses that every chance they get. I wonder if when they got the nickel part and they were like, all right, well, we got to find something laying around here that's as big as this distance.

5:31And some guy was like, you know, there was one sporty guy in the corner, like practicing setting a volleyball spike. He said, what about Jim over there? Is that low-hanging fruit Phil who is about to do that? Oh, man, poor Phil. But, you know, you're right. Nickel compared to a volleyball is pretty good. But let's talk equator. The equator is close to 10 times larger than Earth at 227 miles around compared to Earth's piddly little 25 ,000 miles. Yeah, it's got an extra spare tire compared to Earth's, you know? Totally. One of the things about Saturn, though, if you aren't like an astronomy type, the kind of planet that Saturn is is a gas giant, which means that it's made largely of gas or gases.

6:24So to be a gas giant, you don't have to just be a big ball of gas, but you're made of things that typically are considered gases on the periodic table. Let's just get that straight right out of the gate, okay? But if you put the whole thing together, Saturn doesn't have a surface to speak of. If you did go far enough in toward the center, you might eventually hit something you could stand on, but you would be under so much heat and pressure that you wouldn't be thinking about standing on the surface anymore. You'd have other problems. Yeah, it's a very not dense planet. and some say could even float in water if there was water that large.

7:03A pool? Yeah, or, I don't know, a pond? Sure. Isn't that what they call lakes up in the Northeast? You know, I don't know the difference between a pond and a lake. In Maine, there is no difference. I would think a pond is human-made, but there are many human-made lakes too, so I don't know. I'll have to look that up. I always assumed it was size, like pond is smaller, lake is larger. Well. That's how you remember. Lake, L, large, L. And pond, puny. Nice one. I mean, that seems obvious, but surely there's something else. But maybe not. We'll look into that. More to come on ponds and lakes. Okay, I'll keep talking while you look it up.

7:51I was going to talk, so why don't you look it up. Earth is the third planet out, as Modest Mouse will tell you. They're about 92 million miles away, or we are, rather. Saturn is the sixth planet away from the sun, and things really pick up after you get away from Earth. 886 million miles, which is going to mean they're going to be a very cold planet because they get not nearly as much sun. They get about 1.2 percent of the sunlight that we get, which means the average temperature in the upper atmosphere of Saturn is a very chilly negative 220 degrees Fahrenheit. Or negative 140 Celsius for our non-American Liberian or I can't remember the third one, friends.

8:35That's right. So there's some other interesting things that happen because it gets such little sunlight. but one of the things that astronomers were surprised by at first was Saturn's atmosphere, that is very cold, but it's not nearly as cold as you would expect for how far away from the sun it is and how little sunlight it gets. And they finally figured out the reason why is because Saturn generates its own internal heat. That's why it's not as cold as it should be. Just like me. Yeah, exactly. You could never be cold if you tried, man. I've been cold. And when I get cold, I have a very hard time warming up.

9:13I meant in like the figurative sense, you know, like. Oh, like a cold, emotional individual? Yes, yes. Oh, well, thank you. So there's a couple other things about being that far away from the sun. I think it takes 80 minutes for sunlight to get there. That's a long time to stand around and wait for sunlight. We only have to wait like eight minutes here on Earth. Yeah. So when they flick that switch on, you just got to sit, you got to hunker down. Right. Right. And then so in its orbit around the sun, it takes almost 30 Earth years for Saturn to complete a year. Yeah, because, you know, they're rotating very, very quickly on its axis.

9:52Second fastest in the solar system, second just behind Jupiter. But if you're talking rotation speed here on Earth, we're going at about 978 miles an hour. Saturn is, wow, 23 ,000 miles an hour. Yeah. Almost, no, more than 23 times faster than Earth. And that's going to give it a short day, about a 10.7 hour day. Yes. And here on Earth, for comparison, a day is more than 20 hours long. That's right. So I said earlier, Chuck, that Saturn's a gas giant. And the two gases that it's most fond of are hydrogen and helium. And overall, I think the composition of its atmosphere is about three-quarters hydrogen, one-quarter helium.

10:45But in the planet itself, it has far less hydrogen than helium. That's about all you really need to know about those two for now. But the point of the whole thing is that there is an atmosphere. There are different layers. And the atmosphere itself is about 37 miles thick. And it is just generally gas, but it's also super freaky, as we'll see. But if we zoom in a little further, drop down a little further into Saturn, into its center, and we make it through the 37-mile-thick atmosphere, we're suddenly going to find out that the pressure is extraordinarily great in the next layer, which is a layer of liquid hydrogen.

11:28Yeah, and it's liquid hydrogen because of that pressure. It's just such a massive planet that here on Earth, if we want to make liquid hydrogen, you have to cool that gas down to very, very low temperatures, like negative 423 degrees Fahrenheit. But it's just the pressure on Saturn. Even though those are high temperatures, that pressure alone can make that gas a liquid, which is incredible. It really is. And then it gets even crazier because so further in toward the core, toward the center of the planet, that liquid hydrogen turns into a completely different kind of thing that they call liquid metallic hydrogen.

12:08It's still, again, on the periodic table of gas, even though it's in liquid form, but it behaves like a metal in that it can conduct electricity. So imagine hydrogen gas conducting electricity. And once you put your head back together, because it got blown so wide open from that, you will understand now how heat is generated inside Saturn. It's from that liquid metallic hydrogen just acting like it ain't supposed to. The reason why is because it's so compressed from the pressure toward the center that everything, even the electrons, you remember like electrons are, they are to like a nucleus of an atom what, you know, I think the outer planets in our solar system is to the sun.

12:54They're really far away from it. This pressure is so great in Saturn's center that their electrons are touching. It's all mushed together, and that's why it's behaving weirdly, because the electrons can conduct electricity a lot more easily. And then, if you want to go further down to the core, you talk about hot. We don't know for sure, because you can't get in there. They've tried. They've tried. But the current belief right now is that it's basically compressed molten iron into a ball about the size of 55 Earth and a temperature of about 15 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is hotter than the surface of the sun.

13:36Hot, hot stuff in there. But if we're going to compare core to core, the core of the sun is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, not 15 ,000, you know? Yeah. I saw one other thing about the core of Saturn, and then maybe we'll take a break. Apparently, some researchers have concluded that it's actually slushy, so it's not solid, which makes sense. I mean, you'd think it'd be kind of molten or in some weird state, but that it's also made of, in addition to iron, ice, rock, and gas. and how there could possibly be ice in a core that's 15 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit is totally beyond me. I couldn't see a good explanation of this whatsoever.

14:19It's possible that the researchers who've proposed this completely off their rockers. I don't know. But I thought it was worth mentioning because I think that's fantastic. If it is true, and hopefully there's a Stuff You Should Know listener who is out there is like glaive. And I'm going to email in and explain to Josh and Chuck how there could possibly be ice there. That would be great. Yep. OK, you want to take that here to for promised break? Yeah, let's do it. And we'll be back on. I don't know. Let's talk about like how Saturn was swarmed to begin with right after this.

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16:21All right, so there are a couple of theories about how Saturn was formed. If you're a regular human walking around planet Earth, you might hear both of these and say, sounds like you're kind of talking about basically the same thing. Yeah. If you're an astrophysicist, you might glaven out, as you mentioned before. that's two Glavins and say oh no no no it is a very polarizing question in astrophysics and to us this difference is very large um so yeah so if you're an astrophysicist out there this might really excite you if you're not I would I would dare you I would urge you to try and be delighted in the minutiae of the difference of science and how important that can be The question about how Saturn or gas giants like Saturn form is more polarizing than the proposal to rename Uranus.

17:19Right. If we work together, that's two. That's two. So I'm going to explain the difference because I find this fascinating. There's the main generally accepted model of how planets form, including gas giants like Saturn, is called the core accretion model. And that is basically when a star forms, like our sun, it forms out of dust and gas and all sorts of crazy stuff. And there's a lot of other debris that starts swirling around it, forming a disk. And that's where planets form from. There's all sorts of collisions and things get bigger and kind of clump together. And as they get bigger, they attract more stuff.

17:57and the closer you are into the, or closer you are to the star, the more likely you are to attract heavy stuff, like say iron, nickel, stuff that makes up rocky planets, right? And everybody's like core accretion model. That's just how planets form. But then there's some, uh, there's a group of like renegade astrophysicists led by a guy named Alan Boss who are basically like, no, that it leaves a couple of questions out there. One is that there's less rocky debris in the outer reaches of this disk that's swirling around the sun. So, you know, how can a gas giant be made out of a rocky core? And then secondly, that the remnants that are out there, say like dust and gases like hydrogen and helium, they will float away into outer space and out of the solar system and out of reach before a gas giant could form using the core accretion model.

18:55So what they've come up with instead is called the disk instability model. And they said, you don't need rocky stuff like iron and nickel to form a gas giant. It forms from gases from the start. And the core accretion model people said, OK, smart guys, how? How could that possibly happen? And the disk instability model people said that that swirling disk becomes so compressed and so dense from swirling around the sun for so long that when it breaks up, some of that dust and gas has enough density that it can attract other dust and gases and hence form a gas giant. And the core accretion model people were a gog.

19:38I love that word, by the way. I do, too. It works really well. Well, another remarkable thing about Saturn are the just incredible storms that happen around Saturn. There's a very large temperature difference between the very hot interlators that we were talking about. I can't remember how many degrees Fahrenheit we said. 15 ,000. Yeah, 15 ,000. And then the very icy atmosphere out there is very, very cold. Icy, obviously. And so near the equator, you're going to have winds that are going about a thousand miles an hour. You've got a very erratic atmosphere. So it's not like it's just constantly stormy.

20:22There may be years that go between storms, but then they might go through a storm that lasts like literal years and years and years. They photographed one with the Cassini probe in 2010. And this storm was so big, and this is, you know, on a big planet that it went all the way around and met itself like a single storm system. Like Ouroboros. Yeah, that is just, I mean, we've seen some crazy storms here in recent years where like, you know, from middle Mexico all the way up through like the northeast of the United States. And I'll look at a Doppler and be like, that's incredible to see a storm that large.

21:00So imagine one going all around the entire planet of Earth and then imagine Earth's size in relation to Saturn. And that'll kind of tell you how big of a storm we're talking about. Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. And the reason why that it's got such a crazy atmosphere is because of that temperature difference, the temperature gradients. Remember, we were talking about how tornadoes form on Earth and the tornado alley short stuff that you have to have a temperature gradient. Apparently, the same thing happens on Saturn as well. but there's also Chuck a really weird weather system that does not come and go it's essentially a feature it seems like because it was first photographed in 1981 when the Voyager 2 probe did a flyby of Saturn and when the Cassini mission arrived I think in like 2009 or 10 or something like that it saw that the exact same thing was essentially there so what they figured out is it's not a storm.

21:55It's a really, really fast jet stream. But the thing about it, I'm sure people out there who are familiar with jet streams are like, so big whoop. Well, get this. This jet stream forms a hexagon around the top of the planet. It's one of the weirder things I've ever seen. Yeah. It's like you said, they photographed it in 1981. And then I think the Cassini-Huygens mission ended in 2017, and it was still there and still basically looked the same. And I can only reckon that it's still like that today. Yeah, I think that's a good reckon. We're talking 500 mile an hour winds at the center of this vortex.

22:38And they think that weird shape is due to the really fast rotation, which makes a bulge at the equator and flattens things out at the pole. So it's just created this really strange kind of jet stream, this strange shape. Yeah. So I think, Chuck, we can't really put it off any longer. I believe that it's time to talk about Saturn's rings. Because, I mean, imagine if we didn't in this episode. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned, you know, it's not the only one with rings. I know you mentioned my anus. Mm-hmm. Sorry. That's three. I know. That's the lowest of low-hanging fruit, though. Phil would be like, it's fine.

23:18Yeah, Bill would love it. But Neptune and Jupiter, I'm not sure if you mentioned those. Those are some other ringed planets. But Saturns are like, those are the showstoppers. They're incredible. If you've ever, you know, do yourself a favor. If you've never looked at like real pictures, like telescopic pictures of Saturn, like do so because it's incredible looking, these pictures. I have an anecdote about that. Let's hear it. So remember we did an Australian tour a few years back? It was great, yes. Yeah, it was. On one of the days off, you mean I went to the Sydney Observatory one night. Oh, cool.

23:53And they had, they just happened to have one of their telescopes trained on Saturn. And you could lean over and look through the eyepiece. And we did. And both of us just started laughing because it looked so fake, like a little white cutout of Saturn, just flat as could be. It just looked like they were like, we can't find Saturn. So we're going to have to put this slide in. Yeah, exactly. But the volunteer was looking at us like, what's so funny about Saturn, basically? Right. We just moved along. But that's my Saturn anecdote. And you said it looked fake, and he's like, that's real, man. No, we didn't bother to say anything.

24:32It was mine and Yumi's little joke. That was the worst Aussie accent I've ever done. And I've done some pretty good ones over the years. You have. I don't know what happened. It sounded like Billy Ray Cyrus trying to do an Australian accent. It came out so wrong. It was very strange. It sounded better in my head right before I said it. So, yeah, aside from the telescope slide fake, it's just incredible looking. And the sort of knockout fact is we're still not exactly sure where these rings came from. And we've known about the rings. So, remember, people have known about Saturn since we started looking up at the sky, but you can't see the rings.

25:09But right when people started inventing telescopes, they noticed that Saturn had something weird going on. In 1610, Galileo, the astronomer made famous by the Indigo Girls, he spotted Saturn's rings in his telescope. But it wasn't of high enough quality for him to be like, those are rings. He thought they were like bulges on the side, like handles on a pot or something like that. He wasn't quite sure what the heck it was. He actually, I think, thought it was like a three-body system. Two huge moons and a planet. And it wasn't, but I mean, 50 years later, I guess, even less, that Christian Huygens said, I've got a much better telescope now.

25:51And those are rings. I bet my bottom dollar on it. That was his famous quote. You know what Galileo's crime was? Loving too much? Looking up the truth. Is that what the lyric is? Yeah, that's a great song. Sure it is. You know, I went to the same orthodontist as Emily from Indigo Girls. Oh, that's great. That's my claim to fame. Did, I can't even come up with a joke, but yes, that's great. Shout out to, oh God, Dr. Blake. Hope he's still around. He may not be. This was in the 80s and he was. Oh, okay. And is probably, I mean, he looked 70, but that means he was probably 50. Right. In the 80s, sure.

26:40Yeah. And just for my teenage gaze, you know. I was going to say, that was mean. Like, this is like a recent person he went to. No, I mean, he could still be around. He could be in his 90s probably. But I hope he is. I hope he's still putting braces on kids. Yeah. They don't want them, but he's doing it anyway. He's putting like 1980s braces on kids. They've come a long way. And he's like, no, these metal bands go around your teeth. The lip slashers. Oh, God. All right, so back to the rings. They are 95 % ice. It's rock and ice, but 95 % of it is ice. And these are particles, but when you say particles, it could be a particle, like a sandy grain.

27:22But it could also be like a large boulder. Like they vary widely in size. And here's the thing about those rings, too. They are very, very wide, but comparatively, they are very, very thin. I think the farthest ring, which is 175 ,000 miles from the upper atmosphere of Saturn, is 7 ,000 times the diameter of the planet, but only about 30 to 60 feet wide or thick, I guess. Isn't that nuts? Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Like, how does that thing even exist is my question. Well, we're about to tell you. So if you look at Saturn, especially through a Sydney-based telescope, you're going to see that it looks like it basically kind of cocked its rings to the side like a hat, a jaunty cap, as I put it.

28:15Yeah, I do that sometimes with certain caps. Exactly. Who doesn't? Everybody's familiar with that. Yeah. The thing is, is Saturn's not doing that. Actually, if you straighten Saturn out, its rings would be roughly parallel to its equator. It turns out that Saturn itself is jauntily cocked to the side, too, to the tune of 27 degrees. And Earth's axial tilt, I think, is what it's called. So the tilt relative to the plane of orbit around the sun. Flat plane, tilted planet. Let's just leave it at that. But Earth's is 23 degrees. So 27 isn't that much more. But Saturn's rings like really point out how angled the whole thing is.