The Planets and Beyond

Jupiter... Our largest planetary neighbor.

Jupiter is the king of the planets for a good reason.

It's the biggest.

It dominated the evolution of the solar system.

Jupiter is a violent world of radiation and storms

on an epic scale.

The interior of Jupiter is kind of hard to imagine.

There may be a layer inside Jupiter

where you get diamond rain.

Today, NASA's Juno mission

is unraveling Jupiter's deepest secrets.

What forces shape its mysterious storms

and cause volcanic eruptions

that jet lava deep into space?

Jupiter actually has more in common with our sun

than it does with any of the other planets

in the solar system.

We venture deep inside the most extreme planet

in the solar system

to reveal its inner secrets and investigate

if Jupiter could actually be the sun's secret twin.

Have you ever dreamed about traveling out of this world?

My name is Mike Massimino,

and I turned that fantasy into a reality

when I space-walked to repair the Hubble space telescope.

Great job, Mike.

Now as we expand our knowledge of our solar system

from Mercury to the cosmic unknowns,

I want to take you on a personal journey to...

captions paid for by discovery communications

welcome to "the planets."

I'm Mike Massimino.

Of all the planets in our solar system,

Jupiter is hands-down the biggest and the baddest.

It's a beast of a world full of radiation and violent storms.

It's got so much power,

it's basically its own mini-solar system.

And thanks to the new amazing high-resolution images

from NASA's Juno mission,

more of Jupiter's secrets are being revealed.

Jupiter... The fifth planet from the sun

and the largest in the solar system.

Made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium,

Jupiter stretches more than 85,000 miles across.

It's unfathomably big.

You know, you can fit 1,000 earths inside.

Now scientists have launched a mission

to study Jupiter

in more detail than ever before.

The Juno spacecraft that launched in 2011

reached Jupiter's orbit in 2016,

where it is capturing close-up images and collecting data.

And these newest findings from Juno show a unique

and extraordinarily complex world.

Jupiter has 67 known moons

and probably a giant number of ones

that are not yet known.

It's like a miniature solar system all of its own.

It's a whole environment, a whole ecosystem.

The conditions on and around Jupiter are extreme.

It doesn't behave like an ordinary planet.

Formed at the beginning of the solar system

from the same stuff as the sun,

Jupiter is an enigma.

Is it hiding a secret history?

Could Jupiter be a star in disguise?

Spread across 50 square miles

of baking sand in the scorching Mojave desert,

these giant telescopes

listen for radio signals in outer space.

NASA's Steve Levin is on the front line,

unlocking the secrets of Jupiter.

We've known about Jupiter for thousands of years,

and we've studied it with telescopes

for hundreds of years.

In fact, Jupiter was one of the very first objects

in the sky that was studied with telescopes.

But when we started using radio telescopes,

we learned a lot of surprises about Jupiter.

These telescopes observe space by looking at radio waves

rather than visible light.

And the radio waves that come from Jupiter

aren't what scientists expect to see from a planet.

One of the surprises was this enormous bright radio source

that turned out to be Jupiter.

Jupiter gives off a huge radio signal

far too bright for its size.

Scientists think these signals

are created by small, charged particles

interacting with a magnetic field.

Most planets have a magnetic field,

but Jupiter's is far larger than any other.

In fact, the Juno spacecraft proved

that Jupiter's magnetic field

is 10 times stronger than that of the earth.

So what is causing Jupiter's huge magnetic field?

Scientists believe the answer might lie

within alien chemistry deep within the planet.

More than 300 million miles from earth,

Jupiter is an unimaginably different world.

It's a planet that astronomers call a "gas giant."

It's made almost entirely from hydrogen,

the same material that forms stars like the sun.

But beneath its cloudy surface, a darkness looms.

Scientists believe a thick, black liquid swirls below,

where intense pressures and temperatures

transform hydrogen into a strange new substance.

The secret of Jupiter's giant magnetic field

may lie within this abyss.

Scientists in Edinburgh are conducting

a remarkable experiment to find out.

So, we call Jupiter a gas giant,

but beneath the clouds of Jupiter,

the planet's not really made of gas.

It's made of something much, much stranger.

Scientists know that Jupiter is 90% hydrogen.

Let's go. Things work fast

when they work here.

This equipment can recreate some of the

incredibly high pressures found inside Jupiter,

to find out what happens to a gas

under the extreme conditions deep inside the planet.

In the bottom of the ocean, the pressure from all the water

that's on top of you

is about 1,000 times earth's atmospheric pressure.

And in the center of the earth,

it's about a million times.

But in the center of Jupiter,

it's almost a billion times

the pressure of earth's atmosphere.

Stewart is going to expose a gas

more commonly found on earth

to the pressures found deep within Jupiter.

He uses oxygen because it's easier to control

in the lab, yet reacts to pressure

in the same way as hydrogen.

Oxygen is very similar to hydrogen,

and so, they have similar properties

when you put them under pressure inside a planet.

At low pressures, light can easily pass through the sample.

If I put my hand behind the sample,

the light goes away.

So, we're seeing light, now, coming through oxygen,

and we're able to see right through it.

And of course, oxygen, like hydrogen,

when you squeeze on it, it starts to change.

Stewart begins to squeeze the gas.

Under extreme pressures,

the structure of oxygen transforms.

- 62, 63. - There it goes.

The oxygen has now just turned solid,

and crystals are starting to form in the system.

The oxygen becomes opaque.

It's beginning to change its structure.

We're starting to see, the oxygen's beginning

to turn a little bit darker and a little more orange,

and there it goes.

We've turned, now, our oxygen sample

into a totally black substance here.

We were trying to shine light through it,

and it's being totally absorbed inside the oxygen.

Stewart believes his experiments prove that the pressure

within Jupiter transforms hydrogen gas

into a new, different state.

But this isn't enough to explain

Jupiter's enormous magnetic field.

An even stranger force must be at work.

Deeper inside the planet,

the conditions intensify.

Beneath the dark hydrogen,

scientists think there's an even more bizarre layer...

An ocean of liquid, metallic hydrogen,

an exotic state of hydrogen that doesn't exist on earth.

12,000 miles deep, this metallic ocean transforms the planet

into an enormous dynamo.

As it spins, it creates a magnetic field

that extends nearly 4 million miles around Jupiter,

the biggest planetary structure in the solar system.

Scientists now believe metallic hydrogen

powers Jupiter's magnetic field.

But in the lab, it's proving difficult to make.

The only possible explanation for that magnetic field

is the existence of a metallic state of hydrogen

deep within Jupiter. And so, it's really...

Experiments are trying to catch up to nature.

The pressure inside Jupiter is unrivaled

by the other planets in our solar system.

Only the sun creates a greater force.

Jupiter is so big, so massive that,

we know, as you descend into the interior of Jupiter,

you will reach pressures

where an element like hydrogen

doesn't just liquify.

It actually begins to behave like a metal.

Now, the reason a metal is shiny is that,

metal atoms actually share electrons.

And with the hydrogen compressed so close together,

the same thing happens,

and you get metallic hydrogen.

This metallic hydrogen is something