Five years on, Juno science reveals answers to zodiacal lights, Jovian auroras
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New Research Reveals Secret To Jupiter’s Curious Aurora Activity
Auroral displays continue to intrigue scientists, whether the bright lights shine over Earth or over another planet. The lights hold clues to the makeup of a planet’s magnetic field and how that field operates.
New research about Jupiter proves that point and adds to the intrigue.
Credit: NASA
Peter Delamere, a professor of space physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is among an international team of 13 researchers who have made a key discovery related to the aurora of our solar system’s largest planet.
The Birth of Jupiter s Mysterious Auroral Storms Has Been Observed For The First Time
17 MARCH 2021
Just as Earth has spectacular auroras, so too do other Solar System planets have their own versions of the atmospheric light show.
Jupiter, in fact, has the most powerful auroras in the Solar System - invisible to our eyes, but glowing brilliantly in ultraviolet wavelengths.
Because Jupiter is so wildly different from Earth, scientists are deeply invested in learning what drives these incredible atmospheric phenomena - and they just got a new clue. Thanks to the Juno orbiter, we ve now observed for the first time the onset of Jupiter s mysterious auroral dawn storm.
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
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