In the New World, one of the first recorded sightings of the aurora borealis—on Dec. 11, 1719—didn’t elicit positive responses from the New Englanders who spotted it. Instead, it dredged up apocalyptic fear. Reports of a face appearing in the iridescent night sky lights brought portents of Judgement Day.
Today, the aurora borealis is a tourist attraction. The phenomenon is seen when ejected energetic particles from the sun interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere.
But what’s the phenomenon like on other planets? Well curious reader, wonder no more. The American Geophysical Union has released composite images of Jupiter’s own Northern Lights. The distant planetary phenomenon is the subject of a new study published in the organization’s Journal of Geophysical Research—Space Physics.
According to the researchers, the spectacular aurora is eight times brighter and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s aurora borealis. The observations were recorded in October 2011.
“The sun constantly ejects streams of particles into space in the solar wind,” according to the American Geophysical Union. “When giant storms erupt, the winds become much stronger and compress Jupiter’s magnetosphere, shifting its boundary with the solar wind (1.25 million miles) through space. The new study found that this interaction at the boundary triggers the high energy X-rays in Jupiter’s Northern Lights, which cover an area bigger than the surface of the Earth.”
Over the course of 11 hours, the researchers monitored the solar storms’ impact on the planet. Since X-rays aren’t visible to the human eye, the researchers were able to use their instruments to produce a composite image of Jupiter’s Northern Lights.
“In 2000, one of the most surprising findings was a bright ‘hot spot’ of X-rays in the aurora, which rotated with the planet,” said William Dunn, of the Univ. College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, in a statement. “It pulsed with bursts of X-rays every 45 minutes, like a planetary lighthouse. When the solar storm arrived in 2011, we saw that the hot spot pulsed more rapidly, brightening every 26 minutes. We’re not sure what causes this increase in speed but, because it quickens during the storm, we think the pulsations are also connected to the solar wind, as well as the bright new aurora.”
Scientists hope NASA’s Juno spacecraft, slated for arrival this year, will help shed some light on this phenomenon.
Scientists have known of Jupiter’s auroras for decades. They’ve even been referred to by one scientist as the “Northern Lights on steroids.” They were first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 1 in 1979.
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