Rain made of diamonds and ruby gemstones, two thousand five hundred
degree clouds filled with hellish liquid lava and three hundred and fifty
year old giant mega storms.
This is the most extreme weather in the universe.
Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system and its rings make it
instantly recognisable.
And personally, it's my favourite planet because it rains diamonds from its
clouds. Scientists estimate that around about 10 million tons of diamonds are
produced in Saturn's atmosphere every single year, and the sizes of those
diamonds could vary a little bit
but they're estimated to be about a centimetre across.
That's the size of a four carat diamond.
But why does this happen?
We know that on Saturn there's carbon soot.
The carbon soot is created by lightning.
Lightning actually zapping methane in the atmosphere.
The carbon soot precipitates or falls through the atmosphere.
As the carbon soot falls from the clouds,
this same crystallisation process occurs,
but instead of taking billions of years, it happens in a matter of moments.
Now, in order for a planet to have weather it needs an atmosphere, the
layer of gas that surrounds a planet.
So, for example, Earth's atmosphere is made of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and a
little bit of water vapour as well.
The Planet Mercury and our moon, on the other hand, they don't have an
atmosphere, hence why they look like grey, lifeless rocks.
On earth a cloud forms where it's too
cold for water to stay as a vapour in the air.
Now, that can happen with other materials too, just at different
temperatures. So it's essentially possible to have a cloud made of anything.
But what about planets that are so hot that things that exist in
solids on Earth are actually liquids and
gases in their atmospheres.
I'm talking about things like rock and lava.
Imagine it being so hot that lava evaporates into the air forming clouds,
and then you get lava raining from the sky.
55 Cancri e is an exoplanet that's about 40 light years away from us.
It orbits really close to its star and only that it's also tidally locked,
which means that one side of the planet always faces its sun and it's always
daytime there and it's boiling hot.
The day side is permanently covered in an ocean of molten lava.
It can be hard to picture what lava rain would actually look like, but
volcanic eruptions here on Earth
in places like Hawaii, give us a hint of what it might look like.
Right here was the site of a massive eruption. All along this fissure,
fountains of lava shot into the air nearly 100 metres high.
The liquid lava droplets then cooled and solidified in the air before raining
down onto the surface as these tiny pebbles.
This is what we think the
rain might be like on planets like 55 Cancri e.
Planet hunters and astronomers think they have found an exoplanet with the
strangest rain in the universe.
WASP-12b is an exoplanet 12000 light years away.
It's a gas giant like Jupiter, but it's twice as big and its atmosphere is two
thousand degrees hot.
And that must feel like that we think the conditions will be just right to give us
molten ruby rain.
The way that it scatters light suggests that there are clouds high up in the
atmosphere. At this part of the atmosphere, the temperature is around
two thousand degrees.
So the most likely substance forming these clouds is an aluminium oxide,
called corundum, which forms the basis of rubies.
This crazy extraterrestrial weather doesn't stop at gemstone rain.
There are planets out there that have the most gigantic storms that humankind
has ever witnessed.
We have Mars Rover footage that shows us dust devils that are over a kilometre
high. But impressively, the storms on Mars can reach up to 20 kilometres in
altitude. And it's all down to Mars' atmosphere.
Its atmosphere is one one-hundredth
the pressure of Earth, and the fact of having that really low atmospheric
pressure on Mars means that it can't trap any of its heat.
So Mars is a cold, barren desert compared to Earth or to Venus.
The dust storms are so bad on Mars that every few years or so they engulf the
planet for months at a time.
That's going to have a major impact on any future human missions that we send
to Mars. These storms on Mars, though, are minuscule in comparison to what's
been observed elsewhere in the solar system. We've sent probes and satellites
to all of the gas giants and found some mind blowing weather activity.
The great red spot is a storm on Jupiter that is twice the size of the
entire Earth.
It was first spotted by Giovanni Cassini through a telescope in 1665,
which means it's been raging nonstop for at least three
hundred and fifty years.
And that makes it the longest living storm that we know of.
The outer planets are big balls of gas, and that makes a huge difference in the
weather because you don't have continents, you don't have mountains for
the winds to rub against and there's nothing to control the weather the way
the continents partly control our weather.
Saturn is the planet with the largest and most powerful storm in the solar system
covering four billion square kilometres.
And we know about it because we've seen satellite images of it growing.
On December 5th, 2010,
the radio receiver on Cassini started picking up the radio signal of lightning.
And on the same day, the camera saw a little storm up in the northern
hemisphere of Saturn,
Within six months, the storm grew so large that it wrapped around the entire
planet and its head caught up with its tail.
The truth is, life on Earth is a huge anomaly in our solar system, our galaxy,
and even maybe across the entire universe.
The majority of other planets are a lot less inviting.
So the planets that we found so far aren't particularly nice places to go,
they're not somewhere you put on your vacation list any time soon.
So while we might not describe weather here on Earth as mild all of the time,
astronomically speaking, mild is the most appropriate word.
What makes Earth so habitable is this perfect mix of conditions that we have
that eventually make it like a Goldilocks planet for life, and that includes our
proximity to our star, the Sun, any closer and it would be
a hellish inferno.
And any further away it would be a frozen wasteland.
So it could just be a matter of time before we find a planet that's similar to
Earth. But what we do know is that warm, cold, wet, dry, windy and mild,
all of these conditions work in perfect unison to keep us alive here on Earth.
Essentially, we got lucky.
So think about that the next time you want to moan about the weather.