NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured the latest details of auroras on Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Compared to the auroras on Earth, the “aurora dance” on Jupiter is hundreds of times brighter. With the advanced sensitivity of the Webb telescope, astronomers have conducted in-depth research on this phenomenon to better understand Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
How are auroras formed?
Aurora is a luminous phenomenon produced by high-energy particles entering a planet’s atmosphere and colliding with gas molecules or atoms near magnetic poles. The auroras on Earth include the Northern Lights and Southern Lights, which are usually triggered by solar storms. The charged particles released by the sun impact the Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing gases to glow in colors such as red, green, and purple.
On Jupiter, not only is the volume of auroras enormous, but their energy is also hundreds of times higher than on Earth.
The ‘extra energy’ of Jupiter’s auroras comes from volcanic satellites
Unlike Earth, Jupiter’s auroras are not only influenced by the solar wind, but also by its own strong magnetic field. It captures charged particles in the surrounding space, including those from the solar wind and particles from its highly volcanic moon, Io. The particles from the volcanic eruption of Io escape the gravitational pull of the moon and enter the orbit around Jupiter, becoming one of the energy sources for auroras.
Jupiter’s strong magnetic field accelerates these charged particles, causing them to collide with the atmosphere at extremely high speeds, thereby exciting gas to emit light and form auroras.
New discovery: The rapid changes in auroras are surprising
Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester in the UK led this study.
This is simply a Christmas gift – stunning
We originally thought that the aurora could slowly change within a dozen minutes, but what we saw was that the entire aurora region was rapidly ‘jumping’ and ‘flickering’, even changing every second
The Nichols team also discovered some unexplainable observational phenomena.
What’s even more amazing is that we simultaneously used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture images in the ultraviolet band, but the brightest aurora captured by Webb did not have corresponding bright spots in the Hubble image
This is confusing. To make two telescopes see such a combination of brightness, it would require a large number of low-energy particles to collide with the atmosphere, which was previously thought impossible
The NASA Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning aurora scene on Jupiter. These infrared observations reveal unexpected activity in Jupiter’s atmosphere, challenging scientists’ original understanding of its magnetic field and particle interactions. Combined with the ultraviolet data from the Hubble Telescope, these results raise new questions about Jupiter’s extreme environment.
The research team plans to continue studying the differences between Hubble and Webb data and explore their implications for Jupiter’s atmosphere and space environment. They will also compare the data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft with Webb’s new observations to further investigate the cause of this mysterious strong light.
This research result has been published today in Nature Communications.
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