What causes Jools color?

[ChubbyCat]

Does anyone have theories or ideas as to what makes Jool green? what kind of elements or compounds would cause this color?

Edited December 8, 2021 by ChubbyCat

[jimmymcgoochie]

Whatever makes Saturn that golden yellow colour and whatever makes Uranus and Neptune blue must be present in Jool in roughly equal quantities.

[Scarecrow71]

Neptune is blue due to the absorption of red and infrared light by its methane atmosphere.  Saturn, on the other hand, looks yellow due to sunlight being reflected off the planet's thick clouds.

Jool is a gas giant, so any number of gases could cause it to look green.  Alternatively, high concentrations of chlorophyll could do the same thing.

[GuessingEveryDay]

8 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

high concentrations of chlorophyll could do the same thing

Like Kerbals?

Oh god... Is Jool a graveyard of kerbals?!

[SSTO Crasher]

50 minutes ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Like Kerbals?

Oh god... Is Jool a graveyard of kerbals?!

Um… that got dark quickly

also duh, with all those krakens down there they emit energy and the energy transfer creates green byproducts

[Richy teh space man]

Maybe Jools just a giant plant that everyone thinks is a planet

[king of nowhere]

I'm sure there are mentions of chlorine somewhere, it would give that color.

 

i'm not sure how realistic it would be to have free chlorine around like that, though. chlorine is not such a common element that it could make up a whole layer in a gas giant, and - more important - it is a very unstable gas that's prone to reacting with other stuff, so it wouldn't stay there.

[Guest]

An abundance of green pixels left over from the creation of the other planets in the Kerbal system.

[AtomicTech]

Pistacho Gelato.

[Brofessional]

It's just envious of Kerbin.

[Mahnarch]

Kerbal seeds. That's where they all come from.

 

Jool is the origin of all Kerbalkind. The kraken moves through the Kerbol system, like a bee, pollinating these seeds on Kerbin where they grow to become Kerbalnauts... so they can return to Jool - and jettison excess stages into the planet.

 

[Stranded Lander]

There's a theory that goes around stating that Jool's atmosphere could be rich in chlorine, since chlorine gas is green in colour.

On 12/10/2021 at 6:46 PM, king of nowhere said:

i'm not sure how realistic it would be to have free chlorine around like that, though. chlorine is not such a common element that it could make up a whole layer in a gas giant, and - more important - it is a very unstable gas that's prone to reacting with other stuff, so it wouldn't stay there.

The concern of how common chlorine is is valid. However, an atmosphere consisting of mostly chlorine would not have many potential reactants around it.

[Lisias]

On 12/12/2021 at 4:57 PM, Mahnarch said:

Jool is the origin of all Kerbalkind. The kraken moves through the Kerbol system, like a bee, pollinating these seeds on Kerbin where they grow to become Kerbalnauts... so they can return to Jool - and jettison excess stages into the planet.

The pictorial implications of this are terribly Forum Rules unfriendly....

[SSTO Crasher]

Jool is made of the extremely rare element implodium, and in a gaseous form implodium is extremely rare

[BekfastDerp13]

On 12/8/2021 at 5:50 PM, GuessingEveryDay said:

Like Kerbals?

Oh god... Is Jool a graveyard of kerbals?!

That was my first thought *haha*

[JadeOfMaar]

On 12/8/2021 at 7:41 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

Jool is a gas giant, so any number of gases could cause it to look green.

This may be so, but the distribution of these gases absolutely can never be perfectly even, just as how Jupiter has many colors, and Neptune's blue spans a few hues (in addition there's some white in it, according to some images). Jool should therefore have bands or spots of yellows and blues in addition to the green then. (But this is going to be an artistic challenge in our eyes and can easily look very ugly.)

Unfortunately I've seen a few good options for compounds that produce the right kind of green...

Spoiler

Bad news for the advocates of Chlorine. Chlorine produces yellow-green / Line color which is very clearly not Jool's green.

But none of those compounds are to be expected to occur in gas form, and especially not occur in a gas planet. These compounds tend to involve metals and may require a far higher presence of some other unlikely material (apparently, #1 is Water). My favorites for a proper green color are:

• Iron(II) Sulfate (which is most likely found in a metal aquo complex-- bound to several Water molecules)
  
• Vanadium (pure alkali metal (not happening in nature), also in metal aquo complex)
  
• Nickel (in metal aquo complex)
  

[Watermel00n]

I think its algae that float in jool's lower atmosphere

[cubinator]

On 12/10/2021 at 12:46 PM, king of nowhere said:

I'm sure there are mentions of chlorine somewhere, it would give that color.

 

i'm not sure how realistic it would be to have free chlorine around like that, though. chlorine is not such a common element that it could make up a whole layer in a gas giant, and - more important - it is a very unstable gas that's prone to reacting with other stuff, so it wouldn't stay there.

Chlorine is just as unusual as oxygen. Maybe it is replenished as oxygen can be.

[king of nowhere]

9 hours ago, cubinator said:

Chlorine is just as unusual as oxygen. Maybe it is replenished as oxygen can be.

not really. both are unstable, but we must distinguish between what we call kinetic and thermodinamic stability.

thermodynamics study what is the most stable condition, what will eventually happen in an infinite time. both oxygen and chlorine, in time, will react with almost everything, so both are thermodinamically unstable.

kinetics refers to the speed at which stuff happens. and while oxygen will eventually react, by a peculiar quantomechanical sheanigan of the oxygen molecule it does so very, very slowly. so oxygen is kinetically stable. If oxygen is formed, it will persist a very long time before being consumed. the same is not true for chlorine; chlorine reacts a lot faster, so it's a lot harder to accumulate.

Even more important, oxygen is the third most abundant element in the galaxy, at about 1% molar fraction. I'm having trouble finding exact data for chlorine, but it's between 100 and 1000 times more rare. So having a layer of chlorine is a lot more unlikely

[j-tk]

Joel is actually a body composed of crushed up green kerbals forever orbiting each other, like a kerbal black hole.

[jimmymcgoochie]

New theory: through a combination of differing visual spectra and the ability to see polarised light, what Kerbals see is noticeably different to what humans see. Minmus is green due to refraction of polarised light in the surface crystal layers, Eve is purple because Kerbal vision extends into what humans consider ultraviolet and the planet’s composition is naturally UV-reflective, and Jool’s green colouration can be explained by a combination of the same polarisation effects as for Minmus and different overlaps in the light frequencies that their photoreceptors can detect, like a milder form of red/green colourblindness; in reality, Jool is a more typical gold/brown gas giant, but Kerbal vision doesn’t work that way and so it looks green.

[Admiral Fluffy]

The computer monitor

[Second Hand Rocket Science]

On 2/11/2022 at 2:28 PM, Watermel00n said:

I think its algae that float in jool's lower atmosphere

You ever sent a mission to Jool's surface (ish)? Then you'll know that the gravity is absolutely bonkers. The algae would have to be seriously light, like... a few grams. I don't have time to do the science. And anyways, when you do the aforementioned "Jooldives" you'll not see any algae just floating around. I think that if you could, below the algae would be some excuse for a "surface".

[Watermel00n]

New theory: sulfur!

This explains the instakill -250 altitude i think

[Nazalassa]

Pistachio ice cream means Jool is Minmus' big brother ()