May third in 1999 the people of Central, Oklahoma were just going about their day when storm clouds began to form and the sky turned dark. As the storm intensified the Channel 4 news team caught footage of several vortices swirling on the ground. They and the rest of Oklahoma then stared wide-eyed as this swelled into a massive F5 tornado. It and several smaller tornadoes raged for an incredible hour-and-a-half and tore through the towns of Bridge Creek, Moore, and parts of Oklahoma City Leaving over 9,000 without homes and ending the lives of 41 people By the time the sun rose the next day it had become clear that they had just witnessed one of the worst tornadoes in U.S. history. It's become known as the Bridge Creek, Moore tornado Though the locals just call it the May Third tornado. And it stands out from the rest for one key reason: The wind speeds inside this tornado were clocked at an amazing 318 miles per hour this is the Fastest wind speed ever recorded in human history. And not by a little bit either. The second highest wind speed ever recorded is 295 miles per hour. This was an extraordinary event. Yeah, that's the average wind speed on jupiter. Robert Donnig asks: What would happen if I were to fly into a gas giant? This is another one of the questions that came out of my lightning round video That was a really cool question but too complicated for a short answer so it got a video. But lets just say you're visiting jupiter and a couple of your friends push you out of the spaceship and you fall into jupiter. First of all you need to get new friends The first thing that will happen to you is you would be completely fried by the magnetic field around jupiter Jupiter is 300 times more massive than Earth. It's two-and-a-half times more massive than all the other planets put together The amount of magnetic field that comes out of this thing is insane. A lot of people don't know this now but one of the biggest concerns with the apollo program back in the 60's was flying through the van Allen belts: the belts of radiation that go along the Earth's Magnetic field lines Apollo was going to be the first time human beings had flown through the Van Allen belts and so, many people wondered if it was going to give the astronauts a, you know, deadly dose of radiation or fry all the instruments. By the way, some flat-earthers like to use the Van Allen belt as a reason why there's no way we could have gone to the thus proving that the moon landings were faked. And in fairness that was a real concern back in the 60s But the scientists at Nasa figured out a way to fly around the worst parts of the van Allen belts So it wasn't really a problem But hey if you don't trust Nasa then feel free to build your own rocket ship and fly it through the Van Allen belts But until you're able to do that. I say we just take the opinion of the people who actually have done it Anyway jupiter has its own radiation belts, but with jupiter sized amounts of energy. It might not kill you but it won't leave you feeling very good for what comes next. So you enter the atmosphere, but it'll actually be hard to tell when you actually enter the atmosphere because the upper atmosphere is so thin. Its hydrogen. It's light, so you probably won't even know that you're in it for a very long time. Not to mention the fact that Jupiter is just so big That you're not really going to be able to see the curvature of it like you can on earth. If you go just a few miles up in Earth you can see the curvature. You won't be able to do that on jupiter. So there won't be really any good frame of reference to tell when you've officially crossed into the atmosphere which is kind of a weird part of it. The first level of clouds that you hit will be ammonia ice clouds, below that you'll hit ammonium nitrate clouds and when you go even further than that it becomes dense enough for water clouds to form. These are clouds that are Just like ours except they're flying at 300 miles an hour. So basically you're flying into a gigantic tornado But it's below these clouds where things... start to get weird. Because Jupiter's 90% hydrogen and famously It's kind of a failed star which means that it didn't have enough mass for it to actually fuse it into helium But it did have enough to make it do some really weird things. So right after you pass through the water cloud you're pretty comfortable. The air pressure is about what you're used to and it's warm, but you're dealing. But you keep falling and falling. Okay, so at this point it's dark. The clouds have obscured the sun, so there's no visual frame of reference whatsoever You're falling so you're weightless. You just you just have no perspective at all. The only thing that's changing that lets you know that you're falling further towards the center of jupiter Is that the pressure keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And it's getting warmer. Much, much warmer. And look I'm not going to hold back the secret anymore in case you're still wondering: you die. Falling into jupiter will kill you. It will very kill you. Because right about the time your body is incinerated from the heat, the pressure has also basically Shattered all of your bones and crushed you into something of a charred potato. And as that giant potato that was once you continues to fall, the atmosphere compresses so tight that it becomes sort of a semi liquid. This is a state of matter called Supercritical. Which basically means that it takes on some properties of gas and some properties of a liquid. This supercritical stage is really hard to explain, so I'm not going to try. But the good news is you'll have plenty of time to try to figure out this supercritical state because at this point your body, the density of your body, is about the same as the density of the atmosphere, so you're not going to go any further down You're just going to pretty much float here forever That's the end of your journey But I'm going to keep going down because it's below this point where the ish gets really weird. Because eventually that hydrogen... Gets Metal The majority of Jupiter's hydrogen is metallic hydrogen. This is a state where atoms are pressed so closely together that the electrons flow across the surface of the atoms making it conductive like a metal. This extends for thousands of miles swirling and flowing across the planet at incredible speeds which creates this gigantic electromagnetic field that fried you at the beginning of your journey. And finally at the center, its believed to have a rocky core. A rocky core that you'll never get to because you're floating in the supercritical layer Which you didn't get to experience because you got crushed by the pressure and incinerated by the heat and fried by the electromagnetic shield. All because your friends pushed you out of a spaceship. Why are you friends with these people? But that understanding was interpolated by measuring its electromagnetic fields and composition and mass and so on and so forth. Much of this is thanks to the Galileo Mission which spent eight years circling jupiter and examining it's moons from 1995 to 2003 and it did actually end its mission by flying into the planet But it flew into the atmosphere at over hundred thousand miles an hour so the friction when it hit the atmosphere pretty much just vaporized it immediately. There wasn't any time for selfies. Luckily a new era of discovery is beginning right now with the juno Mission which entered orbit around Jupiter in July of last year. Juno's mission will probably be a lot shorter than Galileo's It's only scheduled to last for 20 months Then again, Galileo lasted three years longer than they expected it to, so who knows. It will study the gravitational and electromagnetic fields around the planet to give us a better idea of what's going on underneath all those clouds including deciding conclusively whether or not it has a rocky core. And figuring that out will give us a lot of clues as to how the solar system formed. So once its tour of duty is over it too will plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere Just another victim of your horrible friends. But in the meantime we'll get to enjoy some really cool science. All right thanks to Robert for a really fun question. If you want a question answered you can hit me in the comments or at any of My social media [channels] that answers with Joe and I will make that question might not like share subscribe and bail I guess we have to say now as always Thank you for watching now you guys go out and have an eye-opening week, and I'll see [you] next Monday. Love you guys. Take care
