Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: I want you to take a second and picture the
Speaker 2: physics of just a regular, everyday morning fog.
Speaker 3: Sure, just you know, a standard terrestrial weather thing.
Speaker 2: Right, So you wake up, you look out the window,
Speaker 2: and the ambient temperature overnight has dropped just enough to
Speaker 2: push the local humidity past its dew point exactly.
Speaker 3: The water vapor in the air condenses into this thick,
Speaker 3: low lying cloud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's quiet, it's very localized. But then a
Speaker 2: few hours later, the morning sun comes up, raises the temperature,
Speaker 2: and the water sublimates right back into.
Speaker 3: Gas, and the fog just vanishes. A really narrow thermal gradient.
Speaker 3: We're talking what maybe a ten or fifteen degree difference
Speaker 3: between the night and the day.
Speaker 2: Right. It happens so easily here on Earth that we
Speaker 2: barely even think about the mechanics of it, we just
Speaker 2: call it weather exactly, but I want you to keep
Speaker 2: that mechanism in mind and then scale it up to
Speaker 2: an absolute planetary extreme.
Speaker 3: Oh man, Yeah, this is where it gets wild.
Speaker 2: Imagine that the suspended particles in that fog aren't liquid water.
Speaker 2: They are vaporized.
Speaker 3: Rock, specifically magnesium silicate, literally vaporized sand.
Speaker 2: Right, And the temperature gradient that burns off this morning
Speaker 2: fog isn't just a gentle sunrise. It is a one
Speaker 2: thousand degree blast of extreme stellar.
Speaker 3: Radiation, which is just I mean, the energy required to
Speaker 3: vaporize a planetary wall of solidifying rock in a few
Speaker 3: hours is staggering. It completely changes how we think about
Speaker 3: atmospheric violence.
Speaker 2: And that sheer atmospheric violence is exactly what we're focusing
Speaker 2: on today because for decades as ronomers have been staring
Speaker 2: at these distant worlds trying to figure out what they're
Speaker 2: made of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, relying on spectroscopy to read the chemical signatures, but.
Speaker 2: They've been blocked by this incredibly mundane physical problem alien clouds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fog in the way exactly.
Speaker 2: It's been this massive thorn in the side of planetary scientists.
Speaker 2: But recently there has been this monumental breakthrough.
Speaker 3: We finally figured out how to wipe the fog off
Speaker 3: the window.
Speaker 2: Right, and the target that allowed us to do this
Speaker 2: is a gas giant known as OBSP ninety four.
Speaker 3: AB WSP ninety four AB. Yeah, it's located in the
Speaker 3: Microscopium constellation, roughly seven hundred light years away from us, and.
Speaker 2: It falls into that classic category we call a hot jupiter.
Speaker 3: Which basically means it orbits incredibly close to its host star.
Speaker 3: It's constantly getting blasted by radiation, and it's tidally locked.
Speaker 2: Okay, so tidally locked, meaning one side of the planet
Speaker 2: is always facing the star.
Speaker 3: Right right, you have a permanent day side that is
Speaker 3: just getting baked and a prominent night side that is
Speaker 3: constantly radiating its heat out into the cold vacuum of space.
Speaker 2: And that intense temperature difference is the engine for this
Speaker 2: whole fog problem. But to really appreciate how big of
Speaker 2: a deal this new discovery is, we have to look
Speaker 2: back at the last twenty years.
Speaker 3: The whole foggy window era of astronomy.
Speaker 2: Right, because general cloudiness has basically stalled our ability to
Speaker 2: study the atmospheres of these hot.
Speaker 3: Jupiters, it really did. I mean the way we study
Speaker 3: these exoplanets is through transmission spectroscopy.
Speaker 2: Right, the telescope breeds the starlight.
Speaker 3: Exactly when the planet transits or you know, passes in
Speaker 3: front of its star. The starlight filters through the very
Speaker 3: edge of the planet's atmosphere like a halo. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: an annulus of gas. And as the light passes through
Speaker 3: different chemicals like sodium or water or carbon monoxide, they
Speaker 3: absorb specific wavelengths of that light.
Speaker 2: And then we catch that light in our telescopes and
Speaker 2: basically look at what's missing to figure out the recipe
Speaker 2: of the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Which works flawlessly, assuming of course, that the atmosphere is
Speaker 3: made of transparent gases.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to the fog. So think of
Speaker 2: it like this. Imagine you're standing across the street.
Speaker 3: From a diner, okay, a diner, Yeah, and.
Speaker 2: You're trying to appreciate the super fine details of a
Speaker 2: masterpiece painting hanging on the back wall inside that diner.
Speaker 2: You know, the painting is there, you can get the
Speaker 2: general shapes, but the diner window is completely steamed up
Speaker 2: with condensation.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: The crucial details are totally hidden because the light from
Speaker 2: the diner gets scrambled before it reaches you.
Speaker 3: In physics we call that me scattering the droplets of condensation,
Speaker 3: or in the case of these planets, the high altitude clouds,
Speaker 3: they literally scatter the photons.
Speaker 2: So the telescope doesn't see the painting.
Speaker 3: No, it just reads the chemical signature of the steamed
Speaker 3: up window. It just reads the cloud layer.
Speaker 2: And for a long time, the best tool we had
Speaker 2: for this was the Hubble Space Telescope, which you know
Speaker 2: is an absolute marvel of engineer.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, But Hubble had a very specific limitation when
Speaker 3: it came to this cloudy window problem.
Speaker 2: Right the wide field camera three.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when researchers pointed Hubble at these hot jupiters, they
Speaker 3: expected to see these nice deep absorption lines for things
Speaker 3: like water vapor.
Speaker 2: But instead the data just came back completely.
Speaker 3: Flat muted because it was just hitting that opaque, gray
Speaker 3: wall of high altitude clouds. Hubble was basically just skimming
Speaker 3: the tops of the cloud decks.
Speaker 2: And the real issue wasn't just that Hubble couldn't see
Speaker 2: through the clouds, it was how it collected the data right,
Speaker 2: it provided this averaged view, yes.
Speaker 3: The spatial integration. That's the technical term for the squish,
Speaker 3: the squishing right.
Speaker 2: Hubble lacked the precision to slice up the data over time,
Speaker 2: so when it looked at the planet passing in front
Speaker 2: of the star, it just took all the light from
Speaker 2: the entire atmosphere mashed it together into one single data point.
Speaker 3: It convolved it so if one side of the planet
Speaker 3: was completely blocked by clouds, that opacity basically watered down
Speaker 3: the data for the entire planet.
Speaker 2: It's like taking a really comple like symphony audio track.
Speaker 2: You've got this delicate string section and then a super
Speaker 2: loud brass section, right, and you just compress the whole
Speaker 2: thing down to a single mono channel with heavy distortion.
Speaker 2: You totally lose the violins because the brass just overrides everything.
Speaker 3: And that's exactly what was happening to our atmospheric models.
Speaker 3: We were building our understanding of these planets based on
Speaker 3: this muddy, compressed data.
Speaker 2: Which was incredibly frustrating. I mean, we were staring at
Speaker 2: a steamed up window for two decades. We needed a
Speaker 2: better tool to isolate the different parts of the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Enter the James Web Space Telescope JWST.
Speaker 2: Yes, the James Web. This is where everything changes because
Speaker 2: JWST didn't just give us a bigger mirror.
Speaker 3: No, it gave us than your infrared spectrograph, the NIRSpec
Speaker 3: and crucially the temporal resolution.
Speaker 2: The ability to track the light perfectly over time, which
Speaker 2: allowed astronomers to do something basically magical. They watched mcguoy's
Speaker 2: pay ninety four AB pass directly in front of.
Speaker 3: Its star, and instead of mashing all the light together
Speaker 3: like Hubble did, they sliced it.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I have to stop you here. I want
Speaker 2: to play Devil's advocate for the listener for a second.
Speaker 3: Go for it.
Speaker 2: This planet is seven hundred light years away from us. Yep.
Speaker 2: From our perspective, it is a sub microscopic speck. It
Speaker 2: doesn't even look like a disk in the telescope, righty.
Speaker 3: It's essentially just a single pixel of light dipping slightly
Speaker 3: in brightness.
Speaker 2: So how on earth is it physically possible to isolate
Speaker 2: the morning weather from the evening weather on a literal.
Speaker 3: Spec It sounds impossible, right, But it all comes down
Speaker 3: to the ingenious geometry of a transit. Let's break down
Speaker 3: how JWST actually reads the leading edge and the trailing edge.
Speaker 2: Okay, the anatomy of the transit walks through it.
Speaker 3: So when Wastpai ninety for ab first begins to cross
Speaker 3: in front of the star, the very first part of
Speaker 3: the planet's atmosphere to get back lit by the starlight
Speaker 3: is the leading edge.
Speaker 2: The front of the planet, essentially.
Speaker 3: Exactly, And because the planet is tidally locked, that leading
Speaker 3: edge represents a very specific atmospheric zone. It's the region
Speaker 3: where the winds are blowing from the dark, freezing night
Speaker 3: side across the terminator into the blazing heat of the
Speaker 3: day side.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the air is moving from night to day.
Speaker 2: That's a sunrise.
Speaker 3: That's the alien morning.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: So JWST takes its first slices of data right then
Speaker 3: at the morning terminator. Right then the planet continues its
Speaker 3: journey across the face of the star, and as it's
Speaker 3: exiting the transit, the very last sliver of atmosphere to
Speaker 3: be backlit is the trailing edge, the back of the planet.
Speaker 3: Right and here the atmosphere flow is going in the
Speaker 3: exact opposite direction. The superheated air from the day side
Speaker 3: is rotating across the terminator back into the dark night side.
Speaker 2: Which makes it the alien sunset the.
Speaker 3: Evening precisely the evening terminator. So by looking at the
Speaker 3: exact timing of the transit, the very beginning versus the
Speaker 3: very end, JWST can completely separate the chemical signature of
Speaker 3: the morning from the chemical signature of the evening.
Speaker 2: Which is just a staggering technological leap To be able
Speaker 2: to not just see the specs seven hundred light years away,
Speaker 2: but to pinpoint incredibly specific localized slivers of its atmosphere
Speaker 2: at exact moments in its rotation.
Speaker 3: It's mind blowing signal processing. They basically take the overlapping data,
Speaker 3: do some intense math and subtract the pieces to reveal
Speaker 3: the distinct morning and evening profiles.
Speaker 2: When they finally did that math on WT ninety four AB,
Speaker 2: the dichotomy they found was bizarre. It totally shattered the
Speaker 2: old Hubble models complete paradigm shift because when they isolated
Speaker 2: the morning edge, the data showed it was entirely clouded over,
Speaker 2: densely cloudy, just a flat wall of opacity.
Speaker 3: But then they looked at the evening edge, the trailing
Speaker 3: limb and the skies were perfectly clear, massive distinct chemical
Speaker 3: absorption features zero clouds.
Speaker 2: A completely cloudy morning and a perfectly clear evening, which
Speaker 2: you know, on its face doesn't sound that crazy to right.
Speaker 3: It happens in Seattle all the time, exactly.
Speaker 2: A foggy morning that clears up by dinner time is
Speaker 2: totally normal on Earth. But this discovery absolutely shocked the
Speaker 2: astronomical community. Why was it such a big deal Because.
Speaker 3: Of what the clouds are made of and the extreme
Speaker 3: physics required to make them disappear. We have to remember
Speaker 3: these aren't fluffy water vapor clouds, right.
Speaker 2: We mentioned this at the start.
Speaker 3: Magnesium silicate, yes, and stay tight and forced to write.
Speaker 3: If you look at the Earth's mantle, these minerals make
Speaker 3: up the vast majority of it.
Speaker 2: We are literally talking about rock sand.
Speaker 3: Yes, So on this planet it is cloudy with a
Speaker 3: high chance of literal sandstorms.
Speaker 2: That's horrifying it is.
Speaker 3: And the reason the morning is so cloudy is because
Speaker 3: of the night side temperature. The dark side of this
Speaker 3: planet is cold enough that gaseous magnesium and silicon actually condense,
Speaker 3: They nucleate and form this massive global cloud deck of
Speaker 3: suspended sand in the dark.
Speaker 2: So you have this solid wall of rock particles, and
Speaker 2: the plant's rotation carries that dark, sandy atmospheric mass right
Speaker 2: across the morning terminator exactly.
Speaker 3: It passes in front of the star as a literal
Speaker 3: physical wall of sand, which perfectly explains why the morning
Speaker 3: data was flat.
Speaker 2: The starlight couldn't punch through the rock.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: By the time that exact same patch of atmosphere reaches
Speaker 3: the evening terminator, the sand is completely gone. The skies
Speaker 3: are crystal clear.
Speaker 2: And that is the massive physical question, right. Yeah, on
Speaker 2: a planet that's bigger than Jupiter, where do thousands of
Speaker 2: miles of suspended, vaporized rock go in just a few hours.
Speaker 3: It's a huge mystery. You have this massive thermal gradient.
Speaker 3: The day side is getting blasted by a thousand degree heat.
Speaker 3: You can't just maintain a static wall of sand under
Speaker 3: those conditions.
Speaker 2: The atmosphere has to react violently.
Speaker 3: Very violently. And researchers basically have two working theories for
Speaker 3: what is causing this great disappearance by nightfall.
Speaker 2: Theory one and theory two. Let's break them down.
Speaker 3: Ray Theory one is the burial mechanism.
Speaker 2: Burial, meaning the clouds are getting shoved underground.
Speaker 3: Basically, yes, So you have this extreme temperature difference between
Speaker 3: the day and the night right that creates an immense
Speaker 3: pressure gradient, and because the planet is rotating, it spins
Speaker 3: up this massive, superfast jet stream right around the equator.
Speaker 2: In the equatorial jet just blast the eastward exactly.
Speaker 3: And as this jet stream carries those heavy sand clouds
Speaker 3: from the cold morning into the blazing hot day side,
Speaker 3: the sudden heat causes complex vertical wind share, meaning.
Speaker 2: The wind doesn't just blow left to right, it blows
Speaker 2: up and down.
Speaker 3: Yes, massive planetary down drafts. The theory is that these
Speaker 3: powerful winds violently plunge downward, dragging millions of tons of
Speaker 3: silicate clouds deep into the planet's interior wow yeah, pulling
Speaker 3: them completely out of sight. So by the time that
Speaker 3: air mass reaches the evening, the upper atmosphere has been
Speaker 3: essentially vacuum to clean the clouds are buried.
Speaker 2: That is intense just to localized vertical wind dragging an
Speaker 2: entire ocean of sand straight down. What kind of immense
Speaker 2: planetary circulation would be required to sustain that.
Speaker 3: Our three D fluid dynamics model suggests it's entirely possible,
Speaker 3: especially near the equator where these forces converge.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's theory one, the burial. The Theory two
Speaker 2: is even more extreme, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Oh, Theory two is the extreme burnoff flash vaporization.
Speaker 2: This is the Earth analogy, but just dialed up to
Speaker 2: a terrifying extreme.
Speaker 3: Precisely, this theory says we don't even need complex downward winds,
Speaker 3: it's just brute force thermodynamics. As the planet rotates and
Speaker 3: that thick wall of solidifying sand drifts out of the
Speaker 3: dark morning and hits the one thousand plus degree heat
Speaker 3: of the day side.
Speaker 2: It just boils the actual chemical bonds of the rock.
Speaker 3: The solid particles literally flash vaporize. They absorb the stellar
Speaker 3: radiation so fast that they sublimate right back into a transparent.
Speaker 2: Gas vaporized into nothingness. Yeah, just completely annihilated by the
Speaker 2: heat of the star.
Speaker 3: Yep. And because gash of silicon doesn't block the infrared
Speaker 3: telescope plight the way solid sand does, the opacity just
Speaker 3: drops to zero.
Speaker 2: So by the time the wind carries that air to
Speaker 2: the evening terminator, it's perfectly transparent. The clouds only form
Speaker 2: again once they cross back into the cold night. Ah.
Speaker 2: A daily planetary scale sand boil. The sheer violence of
Speaker 2: that imagery is amazing. A wall of solid sand flying
Speaker 2: out of the dark and instantly vaporizing in blind and heat.
Speaker 3: It really is incredible to picture. But as fascinating as
Speaker 3: that violent meteorological event is, the absence of those clouds
Speaker 3: in the evening actually provided an even bigger scientific price.
Speaker 2: Right because the evening was finally clear, astronomers could just
Speaker 2: look at the trailing edge and see the actual true atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Of the planet without any fog in the way.
Speaker 2: And this brings us back to that baffling error from
Speaker 2: the old Hubble data. When Hubble was squishing the cloudy
Speaker 2: morning and the clear evening together, the data it spit
Speaker 2: out was deeply, deeply problematic.
Speaker 3: It was a nightmare for theorists because when you convolve
Speaker 3: that data, the massive cloud deck hid all the water
Speaker 3: absorption lines, so the planet looked like it was completely
Speaker 3: depleted of oxygen, but the.
Speaker 2: Carbon lines were still somewhat visible.
Speaker 3: Right, So the old data suggested that WSP ninety four
Speaker 3: AB had a carbon to oxygen ratio of almost one
Speaker 3: point zero.
Speaker 2: Meaning there was basically just as much carbon as oxygen,
Speaker 2: which doesn't sound like a big deal to a layman,
Speaker 2: but in planetary science that's impossible.
Speaker 3: It completely broke existing theories of how planets form. You
Speaker 3: cannot easily explain how a gas giant could form with
Speaker 3: that absurdly high ratio of carbon to oxygen. It also
Speaker 3: implied the planet was hundreds of times more metal rich
Speaker 3: than our own Jupiter.
Speaker 2: So it's like it's like looking at a person who
Speaker 2: is wearing a massive, puffy, leadlined winter coat. Huh exactly,
Speaker 2: and from across the street you look at them in
Speaker 2: this giant coat and you conclude, Wow, that person must
Speaker 2: weigh six hundred pounds. They are medically inexplicable.
Speaker 3: Right, they defy biology.
Speaker 2: But really it's just the coat. And JWST basically just
Speaker 2: waited for the planet to take the coat off in
Speaker 2: the evening so we could finally put it on a
Speaker 2: real scale.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy. The anomaly was a total
Speaker 3: illusion caused by the clouds.
Speaker 2: So what happened when JWST actually weighed the planet so
Speaker 2: to speak, in the clear evening.
Speaker 3: Sky, the unfogged spectrum revealed these massive, beautiful absorption bands
Speaker 3: for water vapor. The oxygen was there all along. It
Speaker 3: was just hiding behind in the morning sandstorm, So the.
Speaker 2: Carbon oxygen ratio wasn't one point zero.
Speaker 3: No, it plummeted right back down to a totally normal
Speaker 3: baseline about point five. And the overall metallicity was only
Speaker 3: about five times that of Jupiter, not hundreds of times,
Speaker 3: so it's.
Speaker 2: Actually incredibly Jupiter like. It completely solved the formation theory crisis.
Speaker 3: Yep, the theorists all breathed a massive sigh of relief.
Speaker 3: The core accretion models didn't need to be rewritten. The
Speaker 3: planet formed exactly how we expect gas giants to form
Speaker 3: out beyond the water snow line in its stellar nursery,
Speaker 3: and then migrated inward.
Speaker 2: The error was entirely observational. We just couldn't see through
Speaker 2: the fog exactly. Fixing our understanding of this one specific
Speaker 2: planet is incredible. But this new technique, this ability to
Speaker 2: isolate the morning and evening to find clear skies on
Speaker 2: a cloudy planet, that has implications for the entire galaxy,
Speaker 2: doesn't it?
Speaker 3: Oh? Absolutely, this is just the beginning. These hot Jupiters
Speaker 3: like WSP ninety four AB, because of their extreme environments,
Speaker 3: they serve as these perfect cosmic laboratory.
Speaker 2: Because the forces are so exaggerated, it makes the physics
Speaker 2: easier to see exactly.
Speaker 3: It's a stress test for our atmospheric models. We can
Speaker 3: study the intense chemistry and the physics of cloud dynamics
Speaker 3: in real time.
Speaker 2: In WSP ninety four AB wasn't just a one off fluke, right,
Speaker 2: The researchers actually expanded their roster.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They took the same asymmetric limb analysis, the morning
Speaker 3: versus evening technique, and applied it to eight other hot
Speaker 3: gas giants.
Speaker 2: And what did they find.
Speaker 3: They found this exact same distinctive cloud cycle on at
Speaker 3: least two other worlds right away, WASP thirty nine B
Speaker 3: and WASP P seventeen B.
Speaker 2: Wow. So it's a fundamental feature of these tidally locked giants,
Speaker 2: a cloudy morning and a clear evening.
Speaker 3: It seems to be ubiquitous, which gives the JWST teams
Speaker 3: incredible confidence as they plan their upcoming large scale observing programs.
Speaker 2: They're scaling up big time.
Speaker 3: Astronomers are moving way beyond just the hot jupiters. Now
Speaker 3: they are preparing to study cloud cycles across a huge
Speaker 3: variet of exoplanets. They're even looking at eccentric gas giants
Speaker 3: that have highly variable heating as they swing close to
Speaker 3: and far away from their stars.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they're perfecting these tools. They're learning exactly how
Speaker 2: to read the weather, how to mathematically strip away the
Speaker 2: clouds on a molten gas chanel. Right, and this is
Speaker 2: the ultimate forward looking question. Is this the necessary stepping.
Speaker 3: Stone to earth like planets?
Speaker 2: Yes? Are we building the exact tools we need to
Speaker 2: eventually look through the clouds of a terrestrial rock planet
Speaker 2: in the habitable zone to find the exact chemicals signatures
Speaker 2: of life.
Speaker 3: Yes, categorically yes. Understanding cloud physics is the mandatory gateway
Speaker 3: to finding true biosignatures.
Speaker 2: Because if an earth like planet has a dense water
Speaker 2: cloud layer and we try to read it the way
Speaker 2: Hubble read the hot jupiters.
Speaker 3: We'd get a completely false reading. A thick cloud layer
Speaker 3: on a rocky world could easily mask the upsten or
Speaker 3: methane we're looking for, or worse, the light scattering off
Speaker 3: the clouds could mimic a gas that isn't even there,
Speaker 3: giving us a false positive for life.
Speaker 2: So if you can't subtract the clouds mathematically, you can't
Speaker 2: trust the biological signature.
Speaker 3: Exactly the work we're doing right now in these violent
Speaker 3: extreme gas giants is building the robust mathematical architecture we
Speaker 3: absolutely need for the future.
Speaker 2: We are learning how to see through the fog so
Speaker 2: that when we finally stare at an Earth twin, we
Speaker 2: actually know what we're looking at.
Speaker 3: That's the ultimate goal.
Speaker 2: It's incredible journey just to recap where we've been today.
Speaker 2: We started with a frustrating twenty year astronomical roadblock, this
Speaker 2: foggy diner window that forced us into using corrupted, squished
Speaker 2: data that threatened to break our entire understanding of planet formation.
Speaker 3: All because of high altitude aerosols right.
Speaker 2: But then through the sheer ingenuity of astronomers using the
Speaker 2: Jans Web space telescope, we figured out how to slice
Speaker 2: the transit into.
Speaker 3: Pieces, isolating the morning from the evening.
Speaker 2: Finding completely localized vaporizing sandstorms, realizing that the violent weather
Speaker 2: was leaving the evening sky clear.
Speaker 3: And then using that clear sky to finally put the
Speaker 3: carbon ratio mystery to rest.
Speaker 2: It's an absolute triumph of observational physics. So as we
Speaker 2: wrap up today, I want to leave you with a
Speaker 2: final thought to Maul over.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love these.
Speaker 2: Next time you walk outside at night and you look
Speaker 2: up at a star in the sky, to your eye,
Speaker 2: it just looks like a seemingly static, twinkling point of light.
Speaker 2: It's peaceful, it's quiet, but it's not. No realize that
Speaker 2: that point of light is just a canvas. Around it
Speaker 2: are worlds with their own millions of localized morning sunrises
Speaker 2: and evening sunsets. Worlds being swept by towering storms of
Speaker 2: vaporized rock and violent plunging winds.
Speaker 3: A dynamic, churning universe of extreme weather
Speaker 2: Systems, exactly a universe of weather that we are only
Speaker 2: just beginning to comprehend.