Skip to main content

Jupiter’s strange, pulsating auroras are even more mysterious than we thought

[ad_1]


Glowing high in the atmosphere, the northern and southern lights shine softly, brilliantly—and on Jupiter, weirdly.



Jupiter, like our own planet, has distinct auroras (northern lights by another name) near its poles. An aurora forms when charged particles are accelerated by a planet or brown dwarf’s magnetic field and slam into the atmosphere, creating beautiful lights in the night sky. In the case of Jupiter, many of the electromagnetic waves thrown off by its auroras are x-rays—invisible to human eyes, but key to understanding more about how auroras on Jupiter form.



In a study published in Nature Astronomy this week, astronomers announced that they’d finally been able to observe Jupiter’s southern x-ray hot spot in detail using data from the XMM-Newton and Chandra space observatories in 2007 and 2016. Surprisingly, Jupiter’s x-ray hot spots weren’t exactly in synch across the hemispheres.



In the southern half of the planet, the x-ray rich aurora pulses at a constant rate, spiking about every nine to twelve minutes. The northern one is much more erratic. It dims and brightens at a pace that is seemingly independent of its southerly counterpart. That’s different from Earth, where aurora caused by solar activity tend to affect both north and south poles in a predictable manner.



“The behaviour of Jupiter’s X-ray hot spots raises important questions about what processes produce these auroras,” study co-author Licia Ray said in a statement. “We know that a combination of solar wind ions and ions of oxygen and sulfur, originally from volcanic explosions from Jupiter’s moon, Io, are involved. However, their relative importance in producing the X-ray emissions is unclear.”



Scientists had previously discovered that solar storms caused increased activity in Jupiter’s auroras, but they’re interested to know if other factors, like Jupiter’s massive magnetic field, have more of an impact on their formation.



Jupiter's auroras present other mysteries too. Last month NASA scientists measured massive amounts of energy swirling in Jupiter's magnetic field, the kind of energy that produces some of the brightest aurora on earth, but tens of times more powerful. Strangely though, those high levels of energy didn't produce the most intense aurora on Jupiter, another way that its auroras don't quite match up with ours.



To solve the myster(ies), they’re going to have to take a closer look. The Juno spacecraft currently at Jupiter doesn’t have an x-ray observing instrument, but it can make other measurements in visible light, radiowaves, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Combined with more remote x-ray observatories, the researchers hope that they can match up observations of x-ray hot spots with other physical processes that Juno observes in the atmosphere, and eventually shine some light on this aurora’s murky origins.




[ad_2]

Written By Mary Beth Griggs

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...
Post a Comment
Read more