Posted 4 days ago
The gas-giant orbiter is illuminating the provenance of Jovian polar light shows.
New results from the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument on NASA’s Juno mission reveal for the first time the birth of auroral dawn storms – the early morning brightening unique to Jupiter’s spectacular aurorae. These immense, transient displays of light occur at both Jovian poles and had previously been observed only by ground-based and Earth-orbiting observatories, notably NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Results of this study were published March 16 in the journal AGU Advances.
This illustration depicts ultraviolet polar aurorae on Jupiter and Earth. While the diameter of the Jovian world is 10 times larger than that of Earth, both planets have markedly similar aurora. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/UVS/STScI/MODIS/WIC/IMAGE/ULiège