The Juno spacecraft of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the dark origins of Jupiter’s mysterious auroral storms, in a recent study.
The findings of the study, published in the journal AGU Advances state that the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument of Juno’s mission, the giant gas orbiter, illuminates the originality of Jovian pole light.
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He appears for the first time the birth of auroral morning storms – an early morning illumination that is unique to Jupiter’s amazing aurorae. These large, non-moving displays of light are available at all Jovian poles and previously were only observed by ground-based and Earth-based observatories, most notably NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
It was first discovered by Hubble’s Fable Object Camera in 1994, and human storms include short-lived but intense glare and expansion of Jupiter’s main auroral egg – a curtain of long-circulating light the two poles – close to where the feeling emerges from the early morning darkness. area.
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Before Juno, ideas from Jovian’s ultraviolet aurora only offered side views, obscuring everything that was happening on the night side of the planet.
According to Bertrand Bonfond, a researcher from the University of Liège in Belgium and the lead author of the study, “Observing Jupiter’s aurora from Earth allows you to see no further than the grip, into the night side of the Jupiter poles . Exploration by another spacecraft – Voyager, Galileo, Cassini – took place from considerable distances and did not travel over the poles, so they could not see the full picture. ”
“That’s why Juno’s data is a true game player, allowing us to better understand what happens at night, where the storms of the day are born.”
Researchers have found that morning storms are born on the night side of the gas giant. As the planet orbits, the storm of the day soon enters its side of the day, where these complex and very clear auroral features become even more intense. light, emitting anywhere from hundreds to thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space.
The jump in brightness means that morning storms are dumping at least 10 times as much energy into Jupiter’s high atmosphere as a normal aurora.
Jupiter’s interior is just as fascinating as the planet’s glowing surface, with a fluid mix of hydrogen and helium hydrogen at its center, massive atmospheric jet streams and alien gravity buildings.
Data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, orbiting the largest planet in the solar system since 2016, gives researchers what they would call an unprecedented view of side dynamics and structure. in Jupiter. Until now, scientists had little knowledge of what lies beneath the thick red, brown, yellow and white clouds of Jupiter.
Jupiter is a type of planet called a gas giant, as opposed to rocky planets like Earth and Mars, and its combination is 99 percent hydrogen and helium. Juno’s data showed that as you go deeper below the surface, Jupiter’s gas is ionized and eventually turns into a hot, dense metallic liquid.