The storms, which involve the illumination and widening of the edge of the oval-shaped array of auroral activity surrounding the poles of Jupiter, develop in a pattern that strikes astonishing in our memory surf attacks in the aurora that spread over the Earth’s pole skies, called auroral substrates, according to the authors.
The new study is the first to detect the storms since they were born on the nocturnal side of the big planet through how they came to be. It was published today in AGU Advances, AGU’s journal for high-impact reports, a short format with an immediate impact spanning all science on Earth and space.
During a morning storm, Jupiter’s quiet and steady auroral arc transforms into a complex and highly vivid auroral feature. It emits hundreds to thousands of Gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space as it turns from night to day and ultimately to day side of the planet over 5-10 hours. Gigawatt is the power produced by a modern conventional nuclear reactor. This colossal brightness means that at least ten times as much energy has been transferred from the magnetosphere to Jupiter’s high atmosphere.
Previously, human storms have only been seen from Earth-based telescopes or the Hubble Space Telescope, which can only offer side views of the aurora and cannot see the side of the planet. Juno orbits Jupiter every 53 days on a long orbital orbit that takes him above the poles of every orbit.
“This is a real game changer,” said Bertrand Bonfond, a researcher from the University of Liège and lead author of the new study. “We finally got to find out what was going on at the side of the night, where the storms of the day are born.”
Familiar auroral sequences, different Por auroras on Earth and Jupiter are images of processes that appear in the surrounding magnetic fields. Both planets generate magnetic fields that capture charged particles.
The Earth’s magnetosphere is shaped by charged particles emanating from the sun called the solar wind. Explosions of solar wind stretch the Earth’s magnetic field to the long tail on the planet’s nocturnal side. When that tail returns, it burns cut grains into the nocturnal ionosphere, which appear as spectacular auroral light displays.
The new study found that the timing of human storms on Jupiter was not related to solar wind changes. Jupiter’s magnetosphere is mostly surrounded by particles escaping from the volcanic moon Io, which then gets ionized and locked around the planet by its magnetic field.
The sources of mass and energy are fundamentally different between these two magnetospheres, leading to auroras which usually look quite different. However, the storms of the day, as revealed by Juno’s ultraviolet spectrum, looked familiar to the researchers.
“When we looked at the entire human storm series, we could not help but notice that Jupiter’s human storm auroras are very similar to a type of terrestrial auroras called substorms” said Zhonghua Yao, co-author of the study and scientific colleague at the University of Liège.
The substrates are the result of explosive remodeling of the tail of the magnetosphere. On Earth, they are strongly related to the changes in the solar wind and the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field. On Jupiter, such explosive rearrangement is associated with overfilling of the plasma derived from Io.
These results show that, regardless of their sources, grains and energies do not always circulate smoothly in planetary magnetospheres. They often accumulate until the magnetospheres fall and generate substrate-like responses in the planetary aurorae.
“Even if their engines are different, showing for the first time the connection between these two very different systems allows us to identify the universal onions from the specifics. which is unique to each planet, “said Bonfond.
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