NOVA: "The Planets: Jupiter" (BBC Studios, Tencent Penguin Pictures, The Open University, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 19) KPBS ran two quite interesting science shows (Wednesday is “their night” for science), a NOVA episode called “The Planets: Jupiter” – third in their 2019 mini-series within the series on the various planets in our solar system, including what they’re made of and how they formed (and what they did to each other in the process of formation) – and the one episode of Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World I had missed when they originally aired, also in 2019, about robots. “Jupiter” had some fascinating guests, and it’s nice to know that astronomy and planetary science are no longer the exclusive redoubt of white males, and old, rather crusty-looking white males at that. One of the interviewees was a Black man, Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and another was an older woman named Fran Bagenal, professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado. She wears her lack of conventional attractiveness as a sort of badge of honor, though also among the interviewees were two genuinely sexy youngish men, Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology and Steve Desch of Arizona State University. They and others were there mostly to discuss the various space probes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has sent towards Jupiter, from Pioneer in 1972 to Juno (which was launched in 2012 and arrived at Jupiter four years later), which gave us our first close-up photos of the surface of the giant planet and also of its up to 79 moons. The big thing about Jupiter is the big thing about Jupiter: its sheer size (about 380 times that of Earth) gives it the second largest gravitational force in the solar system (only the sun’s is bigger) and, this show’s writers argued (there are once again no writing credits but Stephen Cooter is listed as director and I’m presuming he’s responsible for much of the content as well), kept down the size of the so-called “Inner Planets” (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) by making sure they couldn’t accumulate enough mass to become giant planets themselves.

One interesting thing I didn’t know is that as scientists have discovered other solar systems in the universe – other suns with collections of planets – they’ve found out that our system is really quite anomalous, filled with wide differences between the planets in terms of size. The other solar systems we’ve been able to discover in our galaxy tend to be large and have atmospheres that couldn’t be able to sustain life (at least not life as we know it), full of stuff like carbon dioxide and ammonia, which is disheartening to me because it significantly reduces the likelihood that there’s another planet somewhere orbiting another star that could sustain Earth-style life. Maybe we are alone in the universe after all! But the big thing the show stressed about Jupiter is its sheer size pulled planetary rocks away from the so-called “inner planets” and kept them from growing large themselves; the show suggests that Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, didn’t grow into a full-fledged planet largely because Jupiter grabbed all the mass that otherwise could have made it one. In fact, they described Jupiter as marauding its way through the nascent solar system, grabbing potential planetary material right and left, and the only thing that eventually stopped it was the formation of another gas-giant planet, Saturn, whose gravitational field created a resonance with Jupiter’s that essentially settled it into its current solar orbit. The show also suggested that Jupiter’s heavy gravity occasionally grabs an asteroid from the asteroid belt and flings it towards Earth – the current theory as to why the dinosaurs died out as quickly and suddenly as they did is that a giant asteroid fell to earth as a king-sized meteor and radically changed the climate, leading to mass extinction not only of the dinosaurs but 75 percent of both plant and animal species, and the likely source of that asteroid was the gravitational pull of Jupiter. The show went on to state that Jupiter’s role in Earth’s formation has generally been protective; while occasionally it’s flung an asteroid our way and led to catastrophic damage, more often it’s grabbed an asteroid and stopped it from heading towards Earth and wreaking havoc. This show has proven unexpectedly interesting – the “Jupiter” episode has been by far the most fascinating and compelling of the three shown so far – and next week they’re visiting Saturn, which some of the talking heads described as the most unusual and genuinely odd object in the solar system.