NEW YORK: On Earth, we get a fleeting glimpse of aurora such as the Northern Lights.However, on Jupiter, astronomers have found there’s an auroral glow all the time – and it’s an explosive one.
A new study found they sometimes mysteriously explode – causing dazzling brightening up because of a process having nothing to do with the Sun.
A new scientific paper about these observations by Tomoki Kimura of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan, and his colleagues, was published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, and reveals this internal aurora.
The new observations of the planet’s extreme ultraviolet emissions show that bright explosions of Jupiter’s aurora likely also get kicked off by the planet-moon interaction, not by solar activity.
‘Jupiter’s auroral emissions reveal energy transport and dissipation through the planet’s giant magnetosphere,’ the team writes.
‘While the main auroral emission is internally driven by planetary rotation in the steady state, transient brightenings are generally thought to be triggered by compression by the external solar wind.
‘Here we present evidence provided by the new Hisaki spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope that shows that such brightening of Jupiter’s aurora can in fact be internally driven.
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