Original subtitles

Jupiter,

A cosmic colossus reigning over the other planets.

Take the planet earth, now get 1,000 of them,

and that's the size of jupiter.

Hidden beneath its swirling clouds

lie the secrets of our solar system's foundation,

of our planet's violent youth...

When the biggest thing in the solar system

is moving this far this fast,

it changes everything around it.

..and the birth of life.

If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing,

there might be gigantic meteor impact crater.

Now, scientists are unlocking

the giant planet's secrets and discovering that jupiter,

more than any other planet, shapes our solar system's

past, present, and future.

Without jupiter, most certainly,

we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

Jupiter

named after the roman king of the gods, the god of the sky,

it looms between the four inner rocky planets

and the three frozen gas giants beyond.

It is our largest planet by far.

Jupiter is the king of the planets,

and that's because it is the biggest of the planets.

It has a storm on it that's actually four times

bigger than the earth itself,

and it's been raging for hundreds of years.

It has dozens of moons, this gigantic magnetic field.

Everything about jupiter is just huge.

It doesn't do anything small.

If you were looking at our solar system from afar,

you'd look and you'd say,

"our solar system is made of the sun,

jupiter, and assorted rubble.

this vast planet

contains the clues to our solar system's formation,

its evolution, and its eventual death.

jupiter is a cosmic time capsule.

if only we could open it.

in the roman myth, jupiter, the god,

drew a veil of clouds around him to hide his mischief,

and that's, to some extent,

what's happened when we look at jupiter.

we're seeing not the surface of a planet,

but the edge of a cloud.

this shroud of gas hides jupiter's deepest secrets.

one of the big mysteries of jupiter

is what's at the very center. what is its core?

and this is something that we actually don't know yet.

but we do know that what's happening inside jupiter

gives the planets its power.

if we want to know more about what's going on

in this king of the planets,

we're going to need to be able

to part those clouds and peer inside.

simple physics tells us

its massive atmosphere is the stuff of nightmares.

because it's a gas giant, the atmosphere,

as you get deeper into it, just gets denser and denser

and the pressure gets higher and higher.

from the cloud tops to the planet's center

is 43,000 miles.

that's a three-day, nonstop journey in a jumbo jet.

the decent would be a hellish roller coaster ride.

and we know this, because we've tried.

the galileo probe orbited jupiter for years

looking at the cloud tops of the planet

and the moons that orbit it.

but at the end of the mission, they decided they could do

one more scientific experiment.

december 7, 1995.

nasa's galileo space craft drops a 750-pound titanium probe

into jupiter's atmosphere.

it slams into the cloud tops at over 106,000 miles an hour.

even though jupiter looks calm and serene from a distance,

as you get closer,

you realize that there are ferocious winds,

there are lightning storms,

and there are pressures that would crush any instrument.

the planet is 1,000 times the mass of the earth,

and that means as you go inward,

the pressures and densities become very large.

the probe sensors reveal that hydrogen

makes up 90% of jupiter's atmosphere.

temperatures soar to over 300 degrees.

winds rage at 400 miles an hour.

it's hotter and more turbulent than scientists ever imagined.

58 minutes after entering jupiter's atmosphere,

and just 95 miles down, the probe...

vaporizes,

leaving most of jupiter's secrets beyond our reach.

we can't reach the planet's center,

but at the national ignition facility outside san francisco,

scientists can recreate conditions deep inside jupiter.

there are a lot of other facilities

where we can generate, say,

states that are found at the center of the earth

or some of the other terrestrial planets,

but this is the only place

you can recreate the deepest interior of jupiter.

the team takes hydrogen,

the most common element in jupiter,

and freezes it, increasing its density.

then, they fire up the world's largest laser.

multiple laser beams race through a series

of amplification chambers,

intensifying by a quadrillion times,

until, perfectly synchronized, the beams converge.

for 20 billionths of a second,

the laser bombards the hydrogen with 1,000 times more energy

than the entire united states uses at any given moment.

it turns out that at those very extreme pressures,

a hundred million atmospheres of pressures,

chemistry is just completely different.

instead of really distorting the chemical bond,

now, you're distorting how the atom itself behaves.

matter behaves in a fundamentally different way

than we experience it here on earth.

the atoms break down,

transforming the hydrogen gas into a liquid --

a liquid metal concentrated deep inside the planet.

essentially, you would have

this very dense structure,

and it perhaps would look like this massive ball

of mercury at the center of jupiter.

under immense pressure,

the liquid hydrogen emits energy as heat,

pushing temperatures at the edge of this metallic sphere

up to 11,000 degrees.

what lies inside remains a mystery.

there could be a little rocky planet

underneath all of that gas and all of that liquid.

it could be more of a ball of super compressed ice.

there probably is something solid down there.

it's the processes happening inside jupiter

that give the planet its power --

power to shape the solar system since its earliest days.

apart from the sun,

jupiter is the biggest influence in the solar system.

but this monster is shrinking.

is jupiter losing its power?

a thousand times more massive than the earth,

jupiter could swallow all the other planets

in the solar system twice and still have room for more.

but this giant is getting smaller.

gravity is still bringing

all of the gases and liquids together.

and that heats up the interior of jupiter.

this heat rises up to jupiter's surface

and escapes into space.

the planet cools and shrinks,

making the gas giant a third smaller today

than when it first formed.

as the planet cools,

the shrinking slows from an inch a year in its infancy

to just a few fractions of an inch today.

and scientists calculate it could continue shrinking

for 1,000 billion years.

even then, it will always be the solar system's

biggest, most powerful planet.

jupiter is shrinking too slowly for us to see,

but we can see the effect of this rising heat.

this is actually one of the reasons jupiter

has the spectacular weather --

all of those beautiful bands of clouds.

on earth, the sun's heat drives our weather.

switch off the sun, and our weather would stop.

but jupiter's weather would keep on going.

its weather doesn't come from the sun.

it comes from deep inside the planet itself.

heat rises up through the boiling soup of gas,

churning its cocktail of volatile chemicals,

creating jupiter's spectacular swirling clouds.

and the whole time, the giant planet spins.

at 29,000 miles an hour,

jupiter rotates faster than any other planet

in our solar system.

jupiter rotates on its axis about once every nine hours,

compared to a 24-hour day for us.

so, huge, super-heated clouds from the interior

get smeared out by the rotation,

and we have the beautiful cloud tops of jupiter.

this marriage of heat and motion spawns a monster.

jupiter's red spot is a gigantic cyclone,

larger than the size of the earth,

and has been rotating stably with winds in excess

of 250 miles per hour for over three centuries.

imagine a storm that lasts for 300 years.

on earth, cyclones die when they hit land,

but jupiter has no land to stop its storms,

almost unlimited heat to fuel them

and a rapid rotation.

jupiter is basically stoking

the fires of the great red spot.

we're used to storms growing and then going away on earth,

but if they're spinning the right way,

because jupiter is so big and spinning so quickly,

they feed into each other, and it keeps the storm alive.

long after the other planets freeze and die,

jupiter will still be pumping out heat,

driving its monster storms,

thanks to its immense size.

and the secret of its size

lies in the infancy of the solar system.

just over 4.5 billion years ago,

in the disk of dust and gas leftover

from the sun's formation, the first planet forms.

jupiter began to form early on and began to gobble up

water, frozen comets, meteors, and grow.

when you imagine a litter of animals,

one of them usually wins.

and the one that wins is the one

that begins to eat the most first.

the same thing happened with jupiter, in some sense.

jupiter forms at the right time

and in the right place -- just inside the frost line,

the point 325 million miles from the sun

where water vapor turns to ice.

close to the sun,

rocky planets cannot grow very big.

a little bit bigger than the earth,

and the planet falls apart.

further out, however,

ice is a glue that can hold rock together.

and so you have massive rocky ice planets

big enough to capture hydrogen gas and become a gas giant.

close to the sun,

gas is too hot and energetic to stick to anything.

out here, gas is cold and sluggish.

so, when gravity pulls gas towards jupiter's core,

it sticks,

and jupiter balloons.

and as it grew, its gravity grew,

and therefore, its ability to gobble up more increased.

so it was the lucky winner

by starting early and eating often.

the planet eats everything in its reach

until it becomes the giant we see today.

but 4.5 billion years ago, jupiter is in the wrong place.

it's spiraling towards the sun and a fiery death.

the biggest planet with the biggest influence,

jupiter is unique in our solar system,

but not in our galaxy.

october 1995, scientists discover

the first planet beyond our solar system.

51 light-years from earth,

51 pegasi b is a giant gas planet,

similar to jupiter in every way except one.

the first exoplanet found orbiting a star like the sun

was a huge surprise.

it was called a hot jupiter

because it's something roughly the size of jupiter,

but it was tremendously close in to its star,

much closer, even, than mercury is to the sun.

since that first discovery,

astronomers have identified hundreds of gas giants

outside our solar system.

many orbit extremely close to their parent star.

the planet wasp-33 b, 378 light-years away,

orbits so close to its star

that its surface is a scorching 5,800 degrees.

it's the hottest planet ever observed in the universe.

now, we know that planets like that can't form there.

it's just too hot to be able to coalesce from all the gas.

these hot jupiters must have formed farther out.

how do you get a jupiter-like planet

that close to a star?

somehow, you need to be able to build a big planet

and then move it in.

and this had us asking all kinds of questions.

if we see it going on elsewhere in the universe,

is that how our own solar system worked, too?

so now, when we look at jupiter,

we think, all right," that's where it is today,

"but it doesn't mean it's always been there.

it could have moved" all over the place,

"and it just ended up where it is --

where we find it today."

The question is how?

How did this giant planet end up where it is today?

And what effect did a migrating jupiter

have on the other planets?

In 2011, walsh and his team re-imagined the solar system.

They set jupiter adrift, and in the process,

they solve one of the solar system's greatest puzzles.

We would build our models, would get a venus

right where the venus is supposed to be,

would get an earth right where the earth is supposed to be.

But where mars is today,

we were usually getting a venus or earth-massed planet.

No matter what we did, no matter how we changed the model,

we were always getting a really big mars.

All of our simulation

showed that mars, where it is in the disk,

should be at least ten times the mass that it is.

Something came in and literally ate mars' lunch.

And that something was jupiter.

Four and a half billion years ago,

jupiter forms 325 million miles from the sun,

roughly a third closer than it is today.

The orbiting planet collides

with the debris left over from the sun's formation,

and these collisions slow it down.

It loses momentum,

and the sun's gravity pulls it closer.

Jupiter spirals inwards,

gobbling up the raw materials that should have made mars.

So, seeing that result, seeing a great solution

to the small mars problem was kind of the eureka moment.

Like, well, maybe there's a mechanism out there.

We know that planets migrate.

So, let's put these two things together,

and maybe this is going to work.

As jupiter travels inwards,

it bulldozes the rocky material that lies in its path.

On the inward migration, there's a lot of material there.

It actually pushes almost all of that,

about 80 % of it, inward.

And when we make the movies in a certain way,

it really looks like a snowplow.

The gas and dust squeeze

into an inner disk around the sun.

As jupiter orbits,

it pushes against this disk, creating a bulge.

The bulge races round the disk, pulling jupiter with it.

Jupiter accelerates and tries to pull away from the sun.

But the debris behind jupiter continues pushing inwards.

It's a cosmic stalemate,

with the planet trapped between the inner and outer disks.

Then, something extraordinary happens.

The giant planet changes direction.

As we're building this model,

we've had this vision of jupiter coming inwards,

turning around and going outwards.

And we thought of it as a sailboat,

kind of tacking, coming about, turning through the wind.

So, the name the grand tack model,

it actually comes from sailing terminology.

But jupiter is no yacht.

It's a giant supertanker of a planet.

Changing its course is going to take something

seriously powerful.

Enter the solar system's second largest planet,

saturn.

Like jupiter before it,

saturn has spiraled inwards, closing in on the giant planet.

Amazingly, there was this wonderful interplay

between jupiter and saturn.

As they ate up all the material around them,

there was a gap in the disk left over.

With less material behind jupiter and saturn,

there's less holding the planets in place,

allowing the force from the bulging disk

to fling jupiter back out,

with saturn hitching a ride.

The key for stopping jupiter's inward migration

in the grand tack is saturn.

Saturn growing at the right time and at the right place

allowed it to migrate close to jupiter and change

and stop jupiter's inward migration.

Saturn saves jupiter from a fiery fate.

And this grand tack

leaves a parting gift, the earth itself,

because when jupiter migrates out,

it leaves behind the rocky debris it bulldozed in.

It's from this debris that the earth forms.

But beyond mars, jupiter's powerful gravity

pulls on the debris, preventing it from sticking together,

leaving the rubble scattered as a band of asteroids.

Jupiter's gravity is so strong that it determines in some ways

what can exist where in the solar system

and what can't.

The rocky planets,

our planet,

and beyond mars,

the asteroid belt,

they all exist because of jupiter's epic journey.

When the biggest thing in the solar system

is moving this far this fast,

it changes everything around it.

Five million years after it first formed,

483 million miles from the sun,

jupiter reaches its present orbit.

Its outward movement

and the inward pull of the sun's gravity are finally balanced,

but this is still not the solar system that we see today.

The end point of the grand tack model

was actually the ideal beginnings

of what we think happened

later on in solar system history.

But from this stable orbit,

jupiter is about to trigger a deadly domino effect

that threatens to destroy the infant earth.

Four and a half billion years ago,

jupiter orbits between the rocky inner planets

and the icy outer planets.

From this strategic vantage point,

the gas giant dominates our planetary system

and unleashes hell.

In the early environment of the solar system,

where there was a lot more junk surrounding the earth

and in the inner solar system, the earth was bombarded,

as were all other objects, at an incredible rate.

It's an incredibly violent time in solar system history.

We refer to that timescale about several hundred million years

after the planets actually formed

as the late heavy bombardment.

These were very large-scale impacts

and they actually do create melt pools --

liquid rock on the floors of these impact craters.

And some of those craters can glow hot

for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years,

in some cases.

If you were actually on the earth at that time,

there would have been enormous balls of dust

continuously thrown into the atmosphere.

The sky would be hazy, cloudy,

and the terrain would be mountainous

from the rims of craters all around, rocky,

and a wholly unpleasant place to be.

Today, the scars have healed.

Glaciers advance and retreat.

Volcanoes erupt.

Wind and water erase our planet's dust.

But the evidence is still visible if we look up.

Look at the moon.

Every night, you see the moon coming out,

and it's pockmarked,

because for about a billion years

after the solar system was formed, there was chaos.

In 2011, nasa's spitzer space telescope

reveals this kind of bombardment around another star.

Astronomers see a vast disk of gas and dust

circling a young star called eta corvi.

This may be evidence of icy comets and asteroids

swarming into its inner solar system.

Four billion years ago,

the same thing was happening in our solar system.

There was a wave of material, asteroids and comets,

that swept in from the outer solar system.

It turns out it probably came from jupiter and saturn,

the outer planets.

As they were orbiting the sun,

they were interacting with each other gravitationally --

a very complicated dance.

Jupiter goes around the sun three times

every two times that saturn does.

And so, when they would migrate outwards,

they'd be locked in this resonance.

They'd be very close to each other.

And at some point, as they were moving around,

their gravitational powers basically combined,

got a little bit better at affecting the material

around them.

Together, the two inner gas giants

sling the two outer gas giants, uranus and neptune,

even farther out.

Uranus and neptune swap places.

Neptune slams into the frozen dust and gas

in the solar system's outer reaches,

scattering icy debris far and wide.

In the inner solar system,

this debris collides with the asteroid belt.

Billions of comets and asteroids swarm

across the orbits of the earth, moon, and other inner planets.

If that had persisted,

then life never could have evolved.

Only after a few hundred million years

was it possible for life on earth to develop.

But this destruction contains the seeds of creation

because the icy comets deliver a precious cargo.

Jupiter periodically disturbs

objects in the outer solar system, largely water objects,

and directs the towards the earth.

Nowadays, that would be a disaster,

but in fact, if you look at the water on earth,

it's quite likely that almost all of the water on earth

that's now here came from ice that impacted upon the earth,

directed here by jupiter.

Every ocean, every river,

every drop of rain may owe its existence to jupiter.

The gas giant may have even sowed the seeds of life itself.

The chemical building blocks

of life may have hitched a ride to earth on-board a comet.

Without jupiter, life would have never started,

and it would have never survived.

The main bombardment ended 3.8 billion years ago,

but a threat remains.

Every day, nasa's near-earth objects program scans the skies

for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.

So far, they've spotted over 10,000.

And it only takes one to cause a catastrophe.

Just three miles wide,

this small comet is big enough to wipe out life on earth.

Luckily, jupiter is in the way.

Jupiter acts, in a lot of ways,

like the protector of the inner solar system.

By shepherding comets in its vicinity,

ejecting them from the solar system,

jupiter helps protect the earth itself.

In a sense, the way objects move in a solar system

is a little bit like a roller derby.

You've got all of these objects moving around the sun

in the same direction, going around and around and around.

But they have gravity, and they can interact with each other.

Imagine this skater in white

is an icy comet racing in from the outer solar system.

The skaters in black are the gas giants.

The comets veer across the planets' orbits

until it encounters jupiter.

Jupiter moves faster than the comet.

Then, the giant planet's gravity

grabs it and gives it an assist in a slingshot maneuver.

The comet steals some of jupiter's momentum,

accelerates, and changes direction.

Jupiter can fling it out of the solar system

by giving it that extra velocity,

and it goes away.

It's ejected.

Jupiter slings objects out and stands guard.

Every year, 200 times more comets and asteroids

smash into jupiter than the earth.

Something had to be there like a sheriff

to clean out all the riffraff and clean out all the debris,

and that's the planet jupiter.

If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing,

there might be gigantic meteor impact crater.

Without jupiter, most certainly,

we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

Our lives depend on jupiter.

Because of the incredibly important role

that jupiter's played in the evolution of life on earth,

when we look at exoplanets,

when we look for life elsewhere in the universe,

we may not need to look just for those habitable planets.

We may need to look for jupiters or objects

like them that have saved them, as jupiter saved us.

Jupiter is the secret behind our solar system's success.

It makes life on earth possible and helps protect that life.

It may even nurture life, alien life.

Jupiter dominates its neighborhood

for millions of miles, looming over at least 67 moons,

from ganymede,

which is larger than the planet mercury,

to a rock barely a mile across.

The innermost moons are more rocky rich.

The outermost moons are more ice rich.

So, in a lot of ways,

a little miniature solar system.

Jupiter is a cosmic puppet master,

controlling and manipulating its moons

and perhaps making one of them home to life.

March 1st, 2007,

nasa's new horizons probe flies past io,

a moon roughly the same size as our own.

Io is one of the most interesting moons

in the solar system,

and not just because it looks like a pizza.

It's covered with volcanoes.

In fact, these volcanoes, one way or another,

have been continuously erupting

since we've been observing io with space probes,

for the past 20 years.

This small moon

is the solar system's most volcanic body,

with at least 400 active volcanoes.

Together, they pump out 100 times more heat

than volcanoes on earth.

Io's orbit is actually slightly eccentric around jupiter.

Sometimes, it's a little closer to jupiter;

sometimes, a little farther away.

As the gravitational field changes,

io's body, the structure of the moon itself,

is twisted and pulled back and forth.

And that heat through friction, the interior of the moon,

that heat basically melts it,

and that erupts through the surface as volcanoes.

The volcanoes on io are really fascinating.

They're ejecting vast quantities

of sulfur dioxide above the surface of io.

It's split apart by the ultraviolet light

from the sun into sulfur ions, oxygen ions,

and those ions interact

with the magnetic field of the planet jupiter.

Jupiter's magnetic field carries chemicals

and charged particles away from io

and onto its neighboring moon, europa,

making this distant, frozen world

one of our best hopes of finding alien life.

When we got up close to europa with spacecraft,

we saw it was covered in cracks and ridges,

which looked very much

like the way ice floes look here on earth.

And it turns out that's exactly what's going on.

We know, because of seeing the flexure of the ice

and the cracks in the ice on the surface of europa

that there's probably a sub-surface ocean

deeper than the deepest of earth's oceans there

on that little icy moon.

Jupiter's gravity pushes and pulls europa,

creating friction,

generating heat and melting europa from within.

Jupiter is so far away from the sun that it's natural

to assume that anything around it is frozen.

The fact that gravity can heat something up enough

to produce liquid water is profoundly important.

All of the indications of liquid water under the surface

have been indirect --

the way the surface looks, the resurfacing of it.

But very recently, we got direct evidence of water

under the surface of europa in the form of a geyser --

a plume of water being ejected from the south pole of the moon.

November 2013,

analyzing photographs from the hubble space telescope,

scientists spot two giant geysers spewing water 124 miles

into the atmosphere above europa's south pole.

It's the best evidence yet

of liquid water beneath europa's frozen crust.

Seeing direct evidence of liquid water on europa

is terribly exciting.

Finding liquid water is very important for finding biology.

We don't know that wherever there's water, there's biology,

but we're pretty sure that without it,

it would be a lot tougher.

For life to evolve,

it needs water and other chemicals.

And that's where jupiter's magnetosphere comes in,

the network that transports chemicals

from volcanic moon io to europa.

Scientists think the magnetosphere delivers sulfur,

carbon and other minerals,

and that its radiation

splits apart frozen water molecules on europa's surface

into hydrogen and oxygen.

From a biology point of view, what's important is

that there's interesting stuff being made on the surface,

and if that stuff could get carried into the ocean,

organisms might appreciate.

So, europa's geysers are a major discovery.

One of the more exciting aspects of seeing this geyser on europa

is it means that the liquid ocean

underneath the surface has a way of getting out,

which means maybe there's a way of stuff

from the surface getting into the ocean itself.

It could be that in this ocean,

there's a nutrient-rich supply of food.

Life needs water.

It needs food and something else.

You also need an energy source.

On the earth, mostly, that's the sun.

It's light coming down and warming the surface.

On europa, though, if you're deep in that ocean,

it's probably pitch black.

But life can exist without the sun.

If you go to the ocean floors on earth,

there are places where there are vents, cracks in the crust,

and gasses and all sorts of noxious chemicals

are coming up, but there's life there.

An ocean that there could be this flow of nutrients

from the sub-surface into an oxygen-rich water

and life living at this boundary between them,

that's an example right in front of us

of how an ecosystem could be shaped that way.

Life evolves to match the conditions

in which it finds itself.

The conditions under the surface of europa

are very similar to the conditions

at the bottom of the ocean here on earth.

We may find life there,

and if we do, it may look quite a bit like

life under the ocean here on earth.

If there is life beneath europa's surface,

it may outlive us all.

This inhospitable world could become a last refuge

for life in the solar system,

because 5 billion years from now,

the sun is destined to die.

Jupiter, more than any other planet,

has left its mark on our solar system.

The largest planet with the strongest gravity,

it shaped our past and influences our present.

But the planet's future hangs in the balance.

The ultimate fate of jupiter may rest on the fate of the sun.

And in 4 to 5 billion years,

the sun will expand to become a red giant,

perhaps eating up the earth in the process.

We think that the sun's outer layers are gonna

expand possibly even to the orbit of mars.

The earth is possibly going to be engulfed

and completely devoured by the expanding sun.

And when that happens, of course,

it's game over for earth.

Five billion years from now,

the inner rocky planets will burn up.

Will jupiter be next?

From the perspective of somebody orbiting around jupiter,

the sun is going to turn into this angry, fiery thing.

And yet,

jupiter itself is probably going to be relatively safe.

It may lose some of its atmosphere,

but jupiter's a big planet.

It has plenty to spare.

Clearly, the region of the earth will become uninhabitable.

But what's also equally clear is

the regions we now think of as remote,

far away, frozen, become much more attractive.

It'll be warmer,

so its moons might actually warm up.

And it has icy moons.

Right now, they're frozen water, but with the warm sun

for millions or tens of millions of years,

they may actually liquefy.

And europa may become basically a gigantic water droplet,

a self-contained ocean orbiting jupiter.

It's an amazing thought.

Perhaps europa will be life's last,

best refuge as the sun dies.

As the sun evolves,

will the moons of jupiter -- could it be

that they become the prime places

that we either travel to, or perhaps,

life once again begins?

In our dying solar system,

jupiter's moons may offer a safe haven for life.

But jupiter's time in the sun is limited.

After the sun undergoes its dramatic red giant phase,

it's going to collapse down and end its life

almost with a whimper.

It will become a white dwarf.

You wouldn't even be able to see the sun

from the surface of jupiter

when the sun undergoes its final stage

to become a piece of nuclear waste

drifting in outer space.

Jupiter and its moons will become dark once more.

As the sun evolves into a white dwarf,

jupiter will probably go largely unaffected.

Our solar system and the evolution of the sun

won't change its orbit very much.

And it's just gonna keep trucking along and continue

to orbit that old white dwarf for billions of years.

Jupiter will live on,

and with it, the hope of life.

If there's life underneath the ice on europa

somewhere in the ocean beneath the surface,

it's possible that it could still continue,

warmed by the tidal forces from jupiter

even after the sun has met its end as a white dwarf.

The thing is europa is already

a shell of ice with liquid water

that doesn't really need the energy from the sun.

So, if there's life there,

it's not gonna care whether the sun's alive or dead.

They actually might outlive the sun itself.

Five billion years from now,

jupiter will take center stage.

Jupiter determines more than any other planet,

how our solar system works,

much as a conductor governs the dynamics of an orchestra.

As we unlock the planet's secrets,

we're discovering jupiter

is the key to our solar system's success.

We're talking about a planet

that dominates the entire solar system,

whose gravity determines the very structure

of the solar system itself,

a planet whose evolution helped to clean out the solar system.

So, we see that the past

and the future depends on jupiter.

Jupiter has been here

since the solar system's earliest days,

and it'll be here at the end.

Creator, protector, nurturer, and survivor,

jupiter shaped the solar system that we see today

and makes life possible on earth and perhaps beyond.

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