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Imagine yourself living on a planet with constant storms with thunderstorms reaching 40 miles from base to top, five times higher than on Earth, and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts” . Welcome to the gas giant Jupiter.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Earth-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii teamed up with the Juno spacecraft to investigate the most powerful storms in the solar system. A team of researchers led by Michael Wong at the University of California, Berkeley, and including Amy Simon from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Imke de Pater, also from UC Berkeley, are combining length observations. Hubble and Gemini multi-wavelengths with close views from Juno’s orbit over the monster planet 500 million miles from Earth, gaining new insights into turbulent weather in this distant world.
“We want to know how Jupiter’s atmosphere works,” said Wong. This is where the teamwork of Juno, Hubble and Gemini comes into play. “
A flashing radio show light show
Like lightning on Earth, Jupiter’s rays act as radio transmitters, sending out radio waves and visible light when they flash in the sky. Every 53 days, Juno runs low over the storm systems detecting radio signals known as “sferics” and “whistlers”, which can then be used to map lightning even on the day side of the planet or from deep clouds where flashes do not they are visible in another way.
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Matching each pass, Hubble and Gemini watch from afar, capturing high-resolution global views of the planet that are key to interpreting Juno’s close-up observations.
Juno’s microwave radiometer probes deep into the planet’s atmosphere, detecting high-frequency radio waves that can penetrate through thick cloud layers. The Hubble and Gemini data can tell us how thick the clouds are and how deep we are looking inside the clouds, ”explained Simon.
By mapping lightning strikes detected by Juno into optical images captured of the planet by Hubble and thermal infrared images captured at the same time by Gemini, the research team has been able to demonstrate that the lightning strikes are associated with a tripartite combination of cloud structures: Deep clouds made of water, large convective towers caused by an influx of moist air, essentially Jovian storm clouds, and clear regions presumably caused by an influx of drier air outside the convective towers.
The Hubble data shows the height of the thick clouds in the convective towers, as well as the depth of the deepwater clouds. The Gemini data clearly reveals the gaps in the high-level clouds where it is possible to take a look at the deep-sea clouds.
Wong believes that lightning is common in a type of turbulent area known as folded filamentous regions, suggesting that wet convection is occurring in them. “These cyclonic vortices could be internal energy stacks, helping to release internal energy through convection,” he said. “It doesn’t happen everywhere, but something about these cyclones seems to facilitate convection.”
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The ability to correlate lightning strikes with deep-sea clouds also provides researchers with another tool for estimating the amount of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which is important in understanding how Jupiter and the other gaseous and ice giants formed, and therefore, how the entire solar system was formed. .
While much has been learned about Jupiter in previous space missions, many of the details, including how much water is in the deep atmosphere, exactly how heat flows from within, and what causes certain colors and patterns in clouds, still follow. being a mystery. The combined result provides information on the dynamics and three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere.
Great Red Spot “Jack-O-Lantern”
With Hubble and Gemini observing Jupiter more frequently during the Juno mission, scientists can also study short-term changes and short-lived characteristics like those of the Great Red Spot.
Juno’s images as well as pre-Jupiter missions revealed dark features within the Great Red Spot that appear, disappear, and change shape over time. It was not clear from individual images whether these are caused by some mysterious dark-colored material within the high cloud layer, or whether instead they are holes in the high clouds, windows in a deeper, darker layer below.
Now, with the ability to compare Hubble visible light images with Gemini infrared thermal images captured a few hours apart, you can answer the question. Dark regions in visible light are very bright in infrared, indicating that they are, in fact, holes in the cloud layer. In cloud-free regions, the heat from inside Jupiter that is emitted in the form of infrared light, blocked by high-level clouds, is free to escape into space and therefore appears bright in Gemini images.
“It’s kind of a bluff,” said Wong. “You see bright infrared light coming from cloud-free areas, but where there are clouds, it’s really dark in the infrared.”
Hubble and Gemini as Jovian weather trackers
Regular images of Jupiter by Hubble and Gemini in support of the Juno mission are also proving valuable in studies of many other weather events, including changes in wind patterns, atmospheric wave characteristics, and the circulation of various gases in the atmosphere.
Hubble and Gemini can monitor the planet as a whole, providing real-time base maps at multiple wavelengths as a reference for Juno measurements in the same way that Earth-observing meteorological satellites provide context for hurricane hunters from high-flying NOAA.
“Because we now routinely have these high-resolution views of a pair of observatories and different wavelengths, we are learning much more about Jupiter’s climate,” Simon explained. “This is our equivalent of a weather satellite. We can finally start looking at climate cycles. ”
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Because the Hubble and Gemini observations are so important in interpreting Juno’s data, Wong and colleagues Simon and Pater are making all the processed data easily accessible to other researchers through the Mikulski Archives for telescopes. Spaces (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland
“The important thing is that we have managed to collect this huge data set that supports Juno’s mission. There are so many applications of the data set that we cannot even anticipate. Therefore, we are going to allow other people to do science without that barrier of having they have to figure out for themselves how to process the data, “Wong said.
The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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