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NASA’s Juno spacecraft just captured images of colorful bursts of lightning-like electricity high up in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
These phenomena, which include jellyfish-shaped ‘sprites’ and glowing discs called ‘elves’, also occur high up in Earth’s atmosphere during electrical storms.
They were first documented in 1989. Scientists predicted that other lightning-bearing planets, such as Jupiter, would also produce these transient light events.
But no one had ever seen alien goblins or elves until now.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and collecting images of its auroras in ultraviolet light. A team of researchers who processed those snapshots recently noticed something strange.
Jupiter’s south pole and an extremely brief flash of light (circled in yellow). (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI)
“In the process of putting those images together, we noticed that very occasionally we would see these bright, short-lived and surprising flashes,” said Rohini Giles, a researcher on the Juno team, at a press conference Tuesday during the annual meeting. from the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Association.
“Then we went and looked at all the data that we have taken over the four years of the mission and we found a total of 11 flashes, all with very similar properties,” he added.
Each of these outbursts lasted only a few milliseconds.
Giles’ team published a new study on these flashes in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets on Tuesday.
On Earth, sprites appear as long red tendrils, sometimes descending from a diffuse halo. They occur when lightning produces a “quasi-electrostatic field” at high altitude, Giles said.
In other cases, the rays send electromagnetic pulses upward. The pulses produce glowing discs: elves.
Red sprites over the United States photographed from the ISS in 2015. (NASA)
“On Earth, goblins and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere,” Giles said. “But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere is made up mostly of hydrogen, so they are likely to appear blue or pink.”
Juno cannot confirm that these events were triggered by lightning, as the probe’s ray detection instrument is on the other side of the spacecraft from its UV imaging instrument. The images from the two instruments are taken at least 10 seconds apart, a delay that is too long to capture the same short flash of light.
But all else points to these 11 bursts as transient light events: They were very short-lived, emitted a lot of hydrogen, and occurred about 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s water clouds, too high to be lightning. .
“We keep looking for more telltale signs of elves and goblins every time Juno takes a science pass,” Giles said.
“Now that we know what we are looking for, it will be easier to find them on Jupiter and other planets. And comparing the goblins and elves on Jupiter with those on Earth will help us better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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