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Hey everyone, geoysicist Stefan Burns here. We currently have interstellar object three atlas flying towards Jupiter about to perform a very close approach on March 17th of this year, 2026, getting within just about 0.2 astronomical units of the largest planet in our solar system that is just at the edge of Jupiter's hill radius or effectively its zone of gravitational influence. The distance from the Earth to the Sun for reference is one astronomical unit. So it's getting a lot closer than that Earth sun separation distance.
And well, we talked about this quite a while ago about why three Atlas could be in our solar system. If it's not just a comet or an ISO, an interstellar object, if it was in our solar system for some reason, we, you know, played the speculation game. Why would it have such a close approach to Jupiter? Well, Jupiter has quite a lot of moons, dozens and dozens of moons. And in fact, there are some moons there, which could be the perfect place to set up a colony, a space colony. Really, he who owns Jupiter or at least controls that territory in the moons is really do in dominant control of the solar system in terms of asteroid mining, in terms of be able to go into the outer system, the inner system. You want to be on Jupiter. 3i Atlas is performing a very close approach to Jupiter. So, all this time that I've spent researching into this has just led me to a lot of new information.
Well, I was researching into Ganymede and have thought of a few things which are interesting that I want to present to you. Ganymede is more similar to the Earth than most people realize and it has the two main characteristics needed to support life. So, right now a lot of people are talking about Mars as it relates to life, especially in the past. And we are finding increasing evidence of organics and things that are generated by microbes on Mars. And we don't have good explanations for that other than the fact that perhaps in the past billions of years ago, life did generate those things. Uh and there is certainly a lot of talk about there perhaps being life on these icy water worlds of Ganymede and Kalisto and Europa, but we don't have any hard evidence. But Ganymede is special because it has a magnetic field and it also has an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Two things on Earth which if we really zoom out are probably some of the most important factors as it relates to life. So in today's video we're going to be discussing some of the unusual characteristics about Ganymede and perhaps how it already has life there in ways that we really don't know and won't find out more about until perhaps around 2031 with ESA's juice mission when it'll perform a better analysis of Ganymede's atmosphere. So with that let's jump right into it.
Ganymede is one of the four Galilean moons. Those would be Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Kalisto in order of distance from Jupiter. In fact, Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system, being larger than our moon, also being larger than the planet Mercury, and it's one of the few objects that we know of that has an intrinsic magnetic field. This is very, very rare. We see that Mercury has a magnetic field about 1% the strength of Earth. Venus does not have a magnetic field being generated intrinsically within the planet. Earth does, thankfully. Mars does not. Then you go out to Jupiter. Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field. And the other outer gas giants, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, also have powerful magnetic fields, but Ganymede is the only known moon with a magnetic field. As it relates to trans neptunian objects unlikely for them to have magnetic fields but we don't know because we don't really have any direct observational evidence of them but we do for Ganymede.
Ganymede has a magnetic field. In fact, it actually gets aurora across it because it has that oxygen-rich atmosphere and that magnetic field and therefore you can get aurora as Jupiter's radiation environment is really, really intense and gam contained within Jupiter's magnetic field and therefore the radiation belt and more. It receives a lot of radiation from Jupiter also just in general from the space environment. But the fact that Ganymede has a magnetic field, the fact that it has oxygen makes it really, really interesting specifically when you don't focus too much on the details. It's it's good to examine all the different uh angles of how there could be oxygen in the atmosphere. We'll talk about that, but sometimes it's useful just to kind of step back and look at things from a broader perspective. And the fact that has a magnetic field, the fact that has oxygen in the atmosphere is quite unique as we'll discuss.
So, uh inside Ganymede it's quite complex. It's differentiated. Uh you have to take these measurements and observations also with a grain of salt because all this is interpretation at the end of the day. We have the uh the gravity of Ganymede and the mass measurements and its angular velocity and its orbit around Jupiter. And we can use this to kind of have a better understanding of what we're looking at in terms of its bulk density. And we can look at spectroscopic measurements in terms of understanding compounds and elements that are present. Ganyme the ratios. So that only comes from the atmosphere or from the surface. Fundamentally, what's inside is interpretation of these basic parameters. Though we're probably pretty close, but we at the end of the day, we can't know.
So we think that there is a liquid ocean in Ganymede and some evidence for that would be the aurora that we see at Ganymede because it's a saline ocean and that influences how Jupiter's magnetic field interacts with the planet and that would move the aurora to different locations than they would be otherwise. The aurora on Ganyme being closer to the equator than further up in the poles because of those oceans. There is a crust of ice. There's evidence of cryovvulcanism. And then we also think that there is some sort of core and mantle component. And the core could be made up of uh a variety of minerals and elements. For example, iron, nickel, silicon, magnesium, you know, denser elements and minerals would accumulate in the core. But the their exact ratio and abundances and all that is hard to say. But Ganymede is again quite a large uh object. It's you know larger than Mercury. So, it's the largest moon in our solar system. So, I'm sure there's quite a few surprises left for us to discover with Ganymede.
And it has this magnetic field that's being generated. Uh that is one of the first things that is required for life. You need some sort of protective magnetic field, life as we know it, because without Earth's magnetic field, uh effectively life would have stood a chance against the radiation environment of the cosmos and also the sun. We're at one astronomical unit quite close to the sun. We're hit by a ton of high energy particles from the sun. Protons, alpha particles, that's helium. Even up to like iron, ions, and more are all just blasting us all the time. Earth's magnetic field routes most of that away. And some of it goes down to the polar cus and gives us the aurora that we see. But without that, you're having a ton of DNA strand breaks, single and double, molecular and cellular damage. And in general, just life wouldn't probably be able to exist. Ganamine has a magnetic field. That's interesting. That's very interesting. If you really zoom out, you know, it's not that strong, but if you really zoom out, that's one of the key things needed. One of the most important things needed.
If we look at Earth as an example as well, Earth has an atmosphere with a lot of oxygen. That's also a very important component for life. In fact, it's life on Earth that generated that atmosphere. You had the great oxygenation event billions of years ago that you know generated a bunch of oxygen as these microbes and plankton and algae and everything pumped it all up first. It got absorbed in the oceans and turned into iron band deposits. The iron reacted to it settled out. We had these thick red iron band deposits all across the globe as a result of that. Once that was out of the way then that oxygen was able to enter into the atmosphere and basically stay unbound. That's the thing. Oxygen is super super reactive. If you look at geological minerals, almost all of them, if not maybe all of them have oxygen within their chemical formula. They all have some oxygen component to them. Oxygen is one of the most abundant elements in our solar system. And it's not often found in an unbound form or if it is bound like O2, that's still quite reactive, right? You light a match with some oxygen and kaboom, you got something. On earth's atmosphere we have a lot of nitrogen. So that is the main uh constituent of our atmosphere keeping our atmosphere effectively the pressure it is and maintaining a level of homeostasis. But oxygen is actively being produced by life. You know photosynthesizing life and keeping this imbalance actually at homeostasis. That's the key that oxygen would want to react with things. So unless you have active inputs putting into that, it's not going to stay the way it is. You have uh space weather impacts, for example, strong solar wind and solar storms actually causing oxygen in the atmosphere to raise up to the ring current and into the plasmosphere because it's energized. Some of that gets stripped away. Right? We have active oxygen inputs into Earth's atmosphere as a result of life. And the the atmospheric composition that we have without life is not in equilibrium. It would quickly shift to some other composition which can maintain homeostasis in a non-life scenario.
Ganymede also has oxygen in its atmosphere. It's almost predominantly oxygen. We also have water vapor specifically on the sunlit side because we have that solar radiation causing direct sublimation of ice on the surface into water vapor. But most of the atmosphere of Ganymede is oxygen based. Now the key difference between Ganymede and Earth is that its oxygen is much much less dense than Earth's. It's about a 100 billion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere at surface level and then that decreases further out. So here we see Earth's atmospheric pressure and these are five order magnitude jumps right there. So Ganymede's atmosphere has a density that is equivalent to Earth's exosphere at a distance of a thousand kilometers off the surface. And then Ganymede's atmosphere erodes down even further basically becoming negligible. So that is a key difference between Ganymede and Earth in terms of its atmosphere. Its density, its pressure is way lower and its magnetic field is way weaker. But the fact that both of them exist is interesting.
And the explanation right now as to why there's oxygen in uh Ganymede's atmosphere, why even has an atmosphere in the first place, right? Not every moon has an atmosphere and asteroid or thing of that nature, right? Some of them don't have atmospheres, right? Uh is because there are high energy particles from Jupiter's radiation belts hitting the surface, splitting apart water into oxygen and hydrogen. And as a result of that sputtering, you have hydrogen escaping out into space and then oxygen is able to hang out a little bit longer because it's denser. You know, it's heavier and therefore Ganymede holds on to oxygen. So sputtering is the process that currently explains Ganymede's atmosphere. But I just can't stop thinking about how life is what gave Earth its oxygen-rich atmosphere. And that is fundamentally a process that is unstable. If we look at things from a more kind of cosmic perspective, right, life is always fighting to maintain this energy imbalance and this instability and as a result it's actually a very stable system. It's it's quite interesting to think about. Um, and perhaps we have some similar processes occurring on Ganymede. Maybe in the oceans there's some process that generates oxygen. Probably would be so photosynthesis considering there's, you know, tens of kilome thick ice sheets we think and then you have the oceans underneath. But if there is some sort of process generating oxygen that's not just sputtering, that could help explain why there's so much oxygen in Ganymede's atmosphere.
And as it relates to three eye atlas, I personally think it's an interstellar object that's going to continue to fly through. It's provided a lot of uh useful awakenings, you could say, as it relates to us understanding our cosmic environment better. Its close flyby of Mars back in early October. its superior conjunction with the sun as view from earth on the 21st of October. It's perihelion on the 28th of October is all 2025 and now it's close approach of Jupiter March 17th just basically asking us to examine these parts of our solar system more bringing attention to Jupiter and the possibilities that exist there. That said, Ganymede would basically be the perfect place, as far as I know, to set up shop if there was some sort of colonization effort. I don't think that's the case personally, but it makes us think about how that could be our first place to set up for a colonization effort other than, let's say, the moon and Mars. Mars would be a good stepping stone to Jupiter, but it doesn't have some of these benefits that Ganymede does. Specifically being uh in the Jupitarian system allows you to have access to Trojan asteroids and in general the entire asteroid belt and also for going further out deep space missions and also going back to the inner system. So Ganymede is really interesting. It's also uh in Greek myth Ganymede was the water bearer for uh Zeus Jupiter and uh right now we have a lot of Aquarian energy. We're in the age of Aquarius. So uh it's interesting that we have so much attention right now on Ganymede or at least new increasing amounts of awareness uh of Ganymede. ESA's juice mission will explore the Galilean moons in 2031 and beyond and we will learn a lot more about Ganymede then.
So that is it for today. Just wanted to bring your attention there. I've just kind of been thinking about it. Uh, nothing in this video in terms of the speculations for life are definitive by no means, but I think there's something that there's just a little energy thread that's drawing me there. So, I will keep you up to date on everything that's occurring within our solar system, within our cosmos, and more. I've been your cosmic bro, Stefan Burns. Thank you all so much for watching. Smash that thumbs up button to help the channel grow, and I'm wishing each and every single one of you well. So, please take care of yourselves. And I'll see you all in the next.