Making new worlds visible with the Gemini Planet Imager this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. They call it G-Pye, and it has already outstripped the

abilities of all other instruments that allow us to see planets circling distant stars.

We'll talk with scientists Bruce McIntosh and Frank Marchisis about this remarkable new device.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a polar vortex.

In fact, as we'll hear from senior editor Emily Lochuwala, there are many of them just

within our solar system.

Bill Nye has been ogling the great new images from China's Lunar Rover, and Bruce Betts will give away another year in

space wall calendar during what's up. Emily there are so many of the things we

could talk about but I absolutely would love to talk about polar vortices across the solar system, a blog entry

that you posted on the 9th.

This is pretty significant because I guess there are some people who have been questioning

whether this is a real term or whether it was just invented by a nefarious folks who believe that climate change has some human element to it.

Well, if those nefarious folks must be able to travel back in time and put the definition of

Polar Vortex into Al Roker's Meteorological Dictionary from 1959.

He pulled out his copy of his American Meteorological Society Dictionary.

Talking about this feature that actually happens anywhere you have an atmosphere over a spinning ball, which is pretty much anywhere you have an atmosphere,

because anything big enough to have an atmosphere is usually a ball-shaped, it spins, it sets up these

whirling motions in its atmosphere, and usually you wind up with a polar vortex at one or both poles.

I love this because Al Roker actually said to Rush Limbaugh in his demonstrating that this is a term that has been in use for well over 50 years and probably much longer than that

He he said so stuff it

You provide examples elsewhere in the solar system,

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