All language subtitles for The Planets (2019) - S01E03 - The Godfather Jupiter

Liftoff of Messenger on
NASA's mission to Mercury.

Beyond the inner solar system,
past the asteroid belt...

...lies Jupiter.

The largest of the planets is a giant
swirling ball of gas...

...its marbled appearance generated by
violent winds

that rage through its clouds.

Jupiter is a world as strange
as it is remote.

If you fly upwards
only about 100 kilometres or so,

you reach the edge of our atmosphere
and the blackness of space -

it's really not that far.

But once you're in space,

the distance scales
are incomprehensible.

Venus, the closest planet,
is over 40 million kilometres away,

Jupiter around 650 million kilometres.

It takes our fastest spacecraft
years to get there.

So the idea that those planets
could have any influence

on us here on Earth seems fanciful,

and, indeed, if you're talking about your
chances of meeting a handsome stranger,

or your life plans requiring a moderate
reconfiguration about a week on Wednesday,

then you would be right.

However, if you ask more profound
questions, deeper questions,

like, why is the Earth
the way that it is,

why is there life on Earth,
why do we exist at all,

then it turns out that the planets,
and Jupiter in particular,

have had a profound effect.

Early in its life, the young Jupiter
went on the rampage.

The giant planet embarked on a voyage of
destruction across the solar system...

...that transformed
the destiny of the planets

and the course of life on Earth.

Jupiter is the godfather
of the planets.

Understand it, and you understand
how the solar system came to be.

On Earth, we can see glimpses
of Jupiter's power

in the scars it's left
on the face of the planet.

This is the famous
Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona.

It is about a kilometre across,

170 metres from the rim
to the crater floor,

and it was created about 50,000 years ago

when a meteorite 50 metres across

entered the Earth's atmosphere travelling
at about 13 kilometres per second.

That means it would have taken around,
what, seven seconds

to go from the top of the atmosphere
to the ground.

And it hit with such force

that the energy released
was equivalent to ten megatons of TNT.

And that is a very large nuclear bomb.

The meteorite that hit the Earth here

is thought to have come from
the asteroid belt...

...the ring of rocky debris

that orbits at the edge of the
inner solar system.

And it was deflected from its orbit

most likely by the gravitational
influence of Jupiter.

Jupiter is a completely different
class of planet to the Earth.

A gas giant.

A swirling ball of hydrogen and helium

so large you could fit
1,300 Earths inside.

Jupiter can exert such a powerful
influence on the asteroids

because it's so massive -

it's about two-and-a-half times the mass

of all the other planets, moons and
asteroids in the solar system combined,

and therefore it has
a strong gravitational pull.

And this means that
Jupiter exerts an influence

across the entire solar system that's
second only to the Sun.

And that influence does far more
than create the odd crater.

It can change the history of worlds.

To understand how Jupiter rose
to such dominance,

you have to go back to a time before
the solar system even existed.

Nearly five billion years ago,
a distant exploding star

sent a shockwave across the galaxy...

...causing the cloud of gas and dust

that would become our solar system
to collapse...

...as the Sun began to form.

But further out,
something else was growing.

After 50 million years...

...the Sun's nuclear furnace ignited...

...the light of its first dawn
revealing Jupiter...

...the solar system's first world.

A planet born so early,

it swept up most of the material left over
from the formation of the Sun.

Because of its dominance,
Jupiter had a profound effect

on the newly forming solar system,

and paved the way
for our living world to form.

This is a model of our solar system.

So here's the Sun, and then
we have the four inner rocky planets -

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Then comes the asteroid belt,

the ring of millions of small pieces
of rock orbiting around the Sun.

And then the gas giants -
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Now this has a sort of pleasing
regular structure about it,

all the rocky planets close to the star,
and the gas giants further out,

and we thought this must be
the natural order of things,

the way that solar systems
have to form,

until we started to detect planets
around distant stars,

and then we found that this arrangement
is not typical at all.

Our sun is just one of around 300 billion
stars in our galaxy.

And almost every one of those stars is
home to its own system of planets.

In most other systems, the region where
our planet orbits is empty.

Instead, closer to the star,
we see super-Earths -

vast rocky planets
many times bigger than our own.

But, crucially, these worlds are thought
to have thick, toxic atmospheres,

making them completely
inhospitable to life.

And that raises
a very interesting question -

why, then, is our solar system
the way that it is?

To answer that question,

we've sent spacecraft
to every one of the planets.

And they've uncovered strange anomalies

that reveal our solar system's past.

Our missions to Venus found that
it once had far more water

than you'd expect for a planet
so close to the Sun,

just as Earth does today.

The spacecraft we've sent to Mars
touched down on a world that is,

curiously, just half the size of
her sister planets, Earth and Venus.

And in the asteroid belt,

we've uncovered
a graveyard of failed worlds,

their growth mysteriously cut short.

To cause all these anomalies,

it's thought something catastrophic
must have happened

very early in the solar system's history.

All the evidence suggests
that around 4.5 billion years ago,

Jupiter's orbit began to change,

triggering a period of
unprecedented violence

which completely transformed
the face of the young solar system,

and we know this
because the marauding planet

left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Early in its life, Jupiter began to move
inwards towards the Sun.

And the effects of that journey
can be seen to this day.

In between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
lies the asteroid belt...

...a desolate wasteland of debris

left over from the beginning
of the solar system.

Rocky bodies too small to be
planets in their own right.

In science-fiction films,

the asteroid belt is often depicted
as an un-navigable mass

of tumbling rubble,
but it's not like that at all.

So much so, in fact,
that modern spacecraft engineers

can fly a spacecraft through
without making any course corrections.

And the reason for that is, there's
not much mass in the asteroid belt.

The sum total of all of them is
only about 4% the mass of the Moon,

and they're spread out in a huge ring
out beyond the orbit of Mars.

It's a vast amount of space.

That means that the average distance
between any two large asteroids

is about eight times the distance between
the Earth and the Moon.

So I could stand on one of those
large asteroids and look out into space

and my nearest neighbour
would just be a dim star in the dark.

But scattered amongst the rubble

are objects that are far more
than mere rocks.

Five, four, three, two,
main engines start, one,

zero, and liftoff of the Delta II rocket
with Dawn.

In 2007, NASA's Dawn Mission

was sent to explore the two largest
objects in the asteroid belt.

After a year in orbit
around the giant asteroid Vesta...

...in March 2015,

Dawn made its final approach
on a body so large

it makes up almost a third of the mass
of the entire asteroid belt.

Ceres.

On arrival, the first images
Dawn sent back to Earth

contained something entirely unexpected.

Mysterious bright patches

in one of Ceres's largest craters.

Spectral analysis of the images
showed the patches were, in fact,

the salty residue
left behind by liquid water...

...suggesting there must be large amounts
of ice just beneath the crust.

Dawn went on to discover over 300
bright spots all over the surface.

And this means
that beneath its thin crust,

Ceres has a thick, ice-rich mantle
surrounding its rocky core...

...evidence that the dwarf planet is
made up of multiple layers.

The interior of Ceres is like
nothing else in the asteroid belt.

The differentiation,
that separation into layers,

observed by Dawn is more characteristic
of a planet than an asteroid.

So, 4.5 billion years ago,

Ceres was well on its way to becoming
a fully fledged world.

It's thought that, in its infancy,
Ceres was very different.

The water that now lies frozen
within its interior was once liquid.

Protected beneath a thin layer of ice...

...Ceres was once covered by
a deep saltwater ocean.

Before Ceres had
reached its full potential,

a great disturbance
sent shockwaves through

what would one day
become the asteroid belt

and cut its development short.

As Jupiter circled the young sun,
it started to clear a path

through the gas and dust that shrouded
the early solar system.

But that process
caused it to do something alarming.

Gravitational interactions with the gas

made the giant planet spiral inwards
towards the sun...

...ploughing straight through
the region of space

that would become the asteroid belt...

...scattering the material from which
Ceres would otherwise have grown.

Computer simulations of the
early solar system

suggest that the asteroid belt
once contained enough material

to build a planet the size of the Earth,

and perhaps that was Ceres's destiny.

But when Jupiter passed through,
it scattered 99.9% of the material away,

and Ceres's fate was sealed.

Within 100 million years,
Ceres's ocean froze

and was buried beneath its crust...

...the young planet's development
cut short

before it could fulfil its promise.

But Jupiter's reign of terror
was far from over.

It would continue its journey inwards

towards the place our planet
was beginning to form...

...threatening the very existence
of Earth.

Jupiter had such an overwhelming effect
on the young solar system

because of its powerful
gravitational field...

...the effects of which
we can still witness today.

Jupiter exerts its influence
across the solar system

through its gravitational field...

...which is by far the most powerful
of all the planets',

because Jupiter is the most massive
of all the planets -

it's about 320 times
the mass of the Earth.

That's why it was
so destructive in the past.

And we see the power of
that gravitational field today

in its influence on the closest
of Jupiter's largest moons, Io.

Io is the most volcanic world
in the solar system...

...its surface covered with
hundreds of active volcanoes...

...and lakes of molten lava.

The largest, known as Loki Patera,

is more than 200 kilometres in diameter...

...a million times the area of any
lava lake on Earth...

...its surface tormented by
waves of molten rock.

Io is a vision of hell...

...created by the Moon's
proximity to Jupiter.

Volcanism here on Earth

is powered by the internal heat
down below the surface.

Now, much of that is residual heat
left over from the Earth's formation

4.5 billion years ago -
about half of it -

and the other half is down to radioactive
decay of elements around the Earth's core.

Now, on Io, it's different.

Io is a much smaller world and so
it didn't retain much residual heat,

so there the volcanoes
are powered by a different process.

It's known as tidal heating.

The energy that drives Io's volcanism

doesn't come from heat stored
within the Moon.

It's generated by gravity...

...because Io orbits
just 350,000 kilometres

from the tops of Jupiter's clouds.

Io orbits at about the same distance
from Jupiter

as our moon orbits the Earth,

but because Jupiter
is so much more massive,

Io goes around much more quickly.

In fact, it goes around
once every 42 hours.

Now, if Io were Jupiter's only moon,
that orbit would be circular.

But it isn't.

The next moon out, Europa,
goes round Jupiter

precisely once
for every two orbits of Io...

...which means that every second orbit,
Io and Europa fall into alignment.

It's what's known as
an orbital resonance.

That gives it a gravitational kick,

and that moves Io's orbit into an ellipse.

Now, that means that
the gravitational forces on Io

are constantly shifting and changing,

and that stretches and squashes
the moon

and heats it up by friction,

and that is called tidal heating,

and that is the origin of Io's volcanoes.

This process raises the temperature
in Io's interior -

which would otherwise be frozen solid -

to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius...

...creating its lava lakes...

...and powering immense volcanic plumes...

...that rise up to 300 kilometres from
the moon's surface...

...and out into space.

Io provides the solar system
with a vivid reminder...

...of the giant planet's power.

Jupiter's intense gravitational field...

...is the source of Io's volcanism today,

but we don't feel that gravitational pull
here on Earth

because Jupiter is so far away.

But 4.5 billion years ago,

Jupiter was migrating inwards towards
the inner solar system,

approaching the region
where Mars and Earth were forming.

After passing through what would become
the asteroid belt...

...Jupiter entered
the inner solar system...

...continuing its journey
spiralling towards the Sun.

Back then, the area where Mars
and Earth orbit today

was densely packed with gas and rock.

But as Jupiter approached,
it wrought havoc...

...scattering the rocky material
in all directions.

Some sent careering into the Sun...

...others thrown out
into interstellar space.

And it's this that may explain
our solar system's unusual structure.

Here's the solar system today. The Sun,

the four inner rocky planets,

the asteroids and Jupiter,

and what we think may have happened

is Jupiter made it inwards,
through where the asteroids are,

as far in as the orbit of Mars.

Now, that would have cleaned out
quite a lot of the material

in the inner solar system,
leaving less for the formation of planets.

And that's why we don't see
super-Earths in our solar system,

those big, massive rocky worlds that we
see in orbit around so many other stars.

This also might explain
why Mars is so small.

See, if Jupiter was orbiting
in the region that Mars was forming,

there would have been much less
material here, and that might explain

why Mars is only a tenth of the mass
of Venus and Earth.

Had Jupiter continued to move inwards,

it would have had a similar effect
on the Earth...

...meaning the world we inhabit
might never have formed.

But just as it looked like Jupiter would
sweep everything away...

...something stopped the giant planet
in its tracks.

Because in the shadows of
the outer solar system

another planet was forming.

The solar system's second gas giant...

...Saturn.

And its birth changed everything.

When a planet forms in a disc of material
around a star,

as Jupiter did in our solar system,

it tends to clear out a gap in the disc.

Now, the material tends to fall inwards
towards the star -

it's called accretion -
and that drags the whole thing inwards,

and that's what happened to Jupiter.

But then a less massive planet, Saturn,

formed further out.
It cleared out its own disc

and it too fell inwards towards the Sun,

but more quickly than Jupiter.

That meant that Saturn
got into a resonance with Jupiter.

It went round once in orbit around the Sun
for every two orbits of Jupiter.

And that has the effect of cleaning out
the whole region between the two planets.

And that has the effect, through a series
of complicated gravitational interactions,

of slowing and stopping the infall

and eventually causing the two planets
to move back out again.

And that is what happened to Jupiter
and Saturn in our solar system.

Saturn caused Jupiter to retreat,

leaving behind just enough material
from which the inner planets could form.

Mercury.

Venus.

Mars.

And our home, the Earth.

By preventing the formation of
much larger super-Earths,

Jupiter allowed our planet to grow.

And even as Jupiter's reign of terror
was drawing to a close...

...it provided one last parting gift
to our world.

The young Earth formed in an arid region
of the inner solar system.

There was very little water
that close to the Sun.

But as the Earth was forming,

Jupiter was already
tacking back outwards again

into the outer solar system, through the
region that we now call the asteroid belt,

a region populated by many icy,
water-rich comets and asteroids.

And they were scattered
back inwards again,

bringing water back
into the inner solar system.

So I think it is
quite a wonderful thought,

that Earth is a water world today
because of the motion inwards

and then back outwards again
of the massive planet Jupiter.

This idea does seem quite contrived,
almost fantastical.

But the more we learn
about the formation of solar systems

and the more we try to model
a system like ours

with four terrestrial, water-rich planets
close to the star

and then the gas giants further out,

the more we learn that
perhaps all these things had to happen,

these unlikely movements
and interactions between the planets,

in order to produce a system like ours
and a planet like ours.

So places like this
may be extremely rare.

Today, Jupiter has settled into
a regular orbit,

back beyond the far edge
of the asteroid belt...

...its days of marauding
through the solar system at an end.

Jupiter has been established in a stable
orbit for almost 4 billion years.

If I was to sit here on Earth
3.8 billion years ago,

when life began,
and look up into the night sky,

I would have seen it shining there
as a point of light,

the same as it looks today,

distant and seemingly detached,

and it's remained that way for the
vast expanse of time

it's taken for evolution
by natural selection

to transform those first
populations of organisms into all this,

to transform the Earth into an oasis
of life in the desert of the solar system.

But Jupiter's influence over the Earth
remains to this day.

And that's because,
despite its great distance from us...

...it retains a vice-like grip
over the asteroid belt.

It's easy, and I think quite natural,
to think of the asteroid belt

as a single structure, so a ring of rock
surrounding the Sun.

But that's not what it's like at all.

In reality, each one of those millions
and millions of pieces of rock

is following its own individual orbit,

and this remarkable animation is made up
of ten years of astronomical observations,

and every point you see on this animation

is a single asteroid, apart from
all the planets, and so you see

Earth and Mars and Venus
whizzing around the Sun,

but the interesting one is Jupiter,

orbiting just outside the asteroid belt.

And what you can see is that the
asteroid belt dances to Jupiter's tune.

It's the conductor of the asteroid belt,
if you like.

There are complex patterns here,

but there's also structure.

And the reason for that
is the delicate interplay

between the gravitational pull of the Sun

and the gravitational force from Jupiter.

Now, what can happen is that,
perhaps because of an interaction

between two asteroids -
perhaps they collide with each other,

or perhaps on their orbit
they line up perfectly with Jupiter

and get an extra gravitational kick -

those asteroids can be disturbed
from this structure

and be sent inwards
to the inner solar system.

And by that mechanism,

Jupiter has a profound influence
on the planets closer to the Sun.

Around 100 million years ago,

an asteroid ten kilometres across was
ejected from the asteroid belt.

Dislodged by Jupiter's gravity,

it was set on a collision course
with the Earth.

When it struck,
it generated a fireball so hot,

anything within a 1,000-kilometre radius
would have died instantly.

The impact threw 300 billion tonnes
of sulphur into the atmosphere.

And during the nuclear winter
that followed,

75% of all species
were wiped from the face of the Earth.

In one fell swoop, Jupiter changed the
course of our planet's history.

There are a few places on Earth today

where you can catch
a glimpse of lost worlds -

you can see Earth as it was millions
of years in the past

and perhaps glimpse
the Earth as it might have been.

And this is one of them.

Today, this is the Colorado Plain,
over a kilometre in altitude,

south of Denver,
close to the Rocky Mountains.

But 200 million years ago,
this was at sea level.

It was an ancient lake,
and the ghosts of those lost worlds,

the imprint of the past,
can be seen over there,

because there are literally thousands
of dinosaur footprints.

And here they are -
the dinosaur footprints.

I find this absolutely remarkable.

This is the footprint of
a sauropod dinosaur -

that's one of the big ones,
the big herbivores with the long necks.

This animal would have weighed
about 30 tonnes.

It was tall enough to peer over
a two-storey house.

And what happened here is probably
a herd of them, a group of them,

came lumbering across this lake bed.

And then, perhaps that same afternoon,

predators came,
maybe following the herd.

And that's these footprints here -

the allosaurs,
these three-toed footprints.

A much smaller animal,
maybe about twice the height of me,

about two tonnes, very nimble and agile.

And so you see a whole story
played out here, frozen in time.

Today, just their traces remain.

But were it not for Jupiter...

...they might still be here.

There are so many chance events,

not only throughout
the history of Earth,

but also spanning the entire history of
the universe for 13.8 billion years,

without which we wouldn't exist.

There's an unbroken chain of life

stretching back 4 billion years
here on this planet.

You interrupt or interject at any point,
and life on Earth is different.

But having said that,
there are major events that affected life,

and one of them is the asteroid
that wiped out the dinosaurs.

And in that sense, it is certainly true
to say that without Jupiter,

we wouldn't be here.

The godfather of the planets
paved the way for us to inherit the Earth.

And although it occasionally flings rocks
from the asteroid belt our way,

it also protects us.

Because for objects
heading towards the Earth

from the far reaches of the solar system,

Jupiter's gravitational field
acts as a shield.

Around a century ago, a lump
of rock and ice four kilometres across

and weighing 17 billion tonnes...

...was hurtling towards
the inner solar system.

Until Jupiter intervened.

Five, four, three, two, one.

We have ignition and liftoff of Atlantis

and the Galileo spacecraft
bound for Jupiter.

70 years later,

we witnessed just how effective a shield
Jupiter can be...

...on board the Space Shuttle Atlantis,
the Galileo orbiter.

Three years after Galileo launched,

comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
had been captured by Jupiter's gravity.

Locked in the giant planet's embrace...

...tidal forces
now began to tear it apart.

Its journey cut short,

the comet now faced annihilation.

After crossing the inner solar system,

Galileo passed through
the asteroid belt...

...approaching the spot from where it
would witness the comet's final moments.

On July 16th, Galileo saw
the first fragments of the comet

enter Jupiter's southern hemisphere.

Pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

struck Jupiter
over the course of six days.

It was the first time a comet strike
had ever been witnessed.

The most destructive impact

released energy equivalent to
6 million megatons of TNT...

...leaving behind a giant dark cloud
12,000 kilometres across.

By capturing objects
and incinerating them on impact,

Jupiter sweeps up bodies
from the outer solar system

that might otherwise collide with Earth.

Jupiter, the oldest
and largest of the planets,

is the godfather of our solar system.

In youth, it went on the rampage.

For some young planets,
it spelled disaster.

But for others, like our own world,

it cleared the way for their formation.

And in adulthood, it created
the conditions that allowed us to rise.

So we owe Jupiter a great debt.

But as the dinosaurs found to their cost,

it's a debt that could be recalled
at any time.

To the naked eye,

Jupiter's one of the brightest
points of light in the night sky,

and through a small telescope
it is a beautiful banded world.

But it feels distant, eternal,

disconnected from events here on Earth.

But the more we've understood
about the history of the solar system,

the more we've come to understand that
that is not the case.

Jupiter has played an important
and perhaps decisive role

in the stories of all the planets,
including Earth.

You see, the solar system is just that.

It's a system - complex,
interconnected and interdependent.

So next time you see Jupiter, just
hold your gaze, maybe think for a minute,

because it is so much more than
just a point of light,

or a planet, even.

It is the great sculptor
of the solar system.

The destroyer and creator of worlds.

I think people are drawn in by Jupiter

because it's very mysterious,

it's covered by
clouds that hide what's underneath.

It's very violent.

And it's very intimidating.

It's also very beautiful.

It has all these things going on,
and it's hard not to be taken in.

T minus ten, nine, eight,
seven, six, five...

Such is Jupiter's mystique,

it's been a recurring target
for space exploration.

...and liftoff, Atlas V with Juno.
Trek to Jupiter.

In 2011, NASA launched
its latest mission, Juno.

When we launched
the Juno spacecraft

away from the Earth, out towards Jupiter,

we didn't have enough speed to get away,
out of the gravity of the Sun,

so we actually had to
come back to Earth,

get a gravity assist from Earth
and then go out to Jupiter.

After travelling
for five years, Juno finally arrived.

This is a mission that
goes closer to the planet in its orbit

than any other mission ever has,

only a few thousand kilometres
from the cloud tops.

And very, very fast -
we go from pole to pole in two hours,

slipping between the radiation belts
and the cloud tops,

getting the data as fast as we can
and getting out.

So in every way,
Juno is breaking new ground

and that's allowed us to see things
that we couldn't have ever imagined.

Juno's mission is to explore
the planet inside and out.

And amongst the many scientific
instruments it has on board

is its camera, JunoCam.

You see all these swirls.
You see all sorts of spots coming up.

You see all these vortices.

You see dramatic storm systems
interacting.

It's mind-blowingly beautiful pictures
that this little camera has been taking.

JunoCam was able to see the
Great Red Spot from up close.

We can see height to the clouds,

we can see features
that look like storms.

Maybe it's hailing
or snowing ammonia on Jupiter.

And the most startling thing that we saw
from JunoCam's imagery

was that the poles of Jupiter
are actually blue.

They're nothing like
the orange and white planet

that we grew up thinking about
as children.

Juno has just begun to unlock
Jupiter's secrets.

And so, at last, the godfather
of the planets has begun to talk.