Video: Erupting volcanoes cause ‘dancing' light show in space
The lights are similar to the auroras seen on Earth but are 'hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth,' according to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
New information about the fifth planet's aurora was published in the academic journal Nature Communications on Monday, based on photographs taken by the space telescope on Dec. 25, 2023.
'What a Christmas present it was — it just blew me away!' astronomer Jonathan Nichols, from the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement. 'We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.'
Earth's aurora is caused by high-energy particles from the sun that enter the atmosphere and collide with atoms, while Jupiter's massive aurora includes an additional source.
The planet's strong magnetic field grabs the particles from its surroundings, including from one of its moons, Io, astronomers said. The moon's volcanic surface erupts with particles that enter Jupiter's orbit. The magnetic field causes these particles to move at tremendous speeds, resulting in the glow of the aurora.
Nichols' team also found that the brightest lights observed by the Webb Space Telescope were not spotted in pictures taken at the same time by a different telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, leaving the team 'scratching our heads,' Nichols said in the statement.
The team will study this discrepancy between the two telescopes and further explore Jupiter's atmosphere and space environment. This information will then be compared with data collected from NASA's Juno spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter since 2016, 'to better explore the cause of the enigmatic bright emission,' the team said.
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